{"id":96802,"date":"2022-07-25T17:05:17","date_gmt":"2022-07-25T15:05:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=96802"},"modified":"2022-07-16T06:43:34","modified_gmt":"2022-07-16T04:43:34","slug":"25-05-72","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=96802","title":{"rendered":"My Favorite Antisemite: Hans-J\u00fcrgen Syberberg"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>My Favorite Antisemite: Hans-J\u00fcrgen Syberberg<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n


\nMARDEAN ISAAC<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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The director\u2019s films tackled the grandest questions in German culture and politics, before he turned his critical eye to the Jews.<\/strong><\/span>
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Hans-J\u00fcrgen Syberberg, Germany, circa 1980UNITED ARCHIVES GMBH\/ALAMY<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

My Favorite Anti-Semite<\/a>:<\/strong><\/span> an occasional series of tributes to writers, artists, philosophers, and others who hate us and to why we still find value in their work.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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[W.K\u00a0 Szwecje ktora przez lata rzadzona jest przez Socjalistow nie ominal tez\u00a0 i “soc-realizm”. Dlatego w bibliotekach preferowano pamietniki ludzi pracy “drwala” lub “sprzataczki” a wszystkie ksiazki Karl May’a (Winetu itd) uznano za nierealistyczna fantazje i poszly na przemial. ]\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Hans-J\u00fcrgen Syberberg<\/span><\/strong> is sitting on couches with Susan Sontag, Martin Scorsese, and others, watching his recent news appearance on American television. It is January 1980, and the German director is in New York City promoting the seven-and-a half-hour Hitler: A Film from Germany<\/em>\u00a0(titled\u00a0Our Hitler<\/em>\u00a0in the U.S.). A presenter says his film is about Hitler as \u201cseen through the eyes of Germans.\u201d Syberberg, an impish yet regimented presence, periodically photographs those in the room as they observe his interview on the screen. Sontag, smirking, agrees with Scorsese that Syberberg\u2019s pitch to American media went well: \u201cPeople got something that\u2019s clear and easy to remember.\u201d\u00a0Footage<\/a>\u00a0of the U.S. tour is eventually appended to copies of the film.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Sontag called\u00a0Hitler<\/em>\u00a0the most extraordinary film she had ever seen. Her\u00a0NYRB\u00a0<\/em>essay<\/a>\u00a0on Syberberg\u2019s opus remains one of the most committed and perceptive attempts to describe it\u2014an almost impossible task to carry out adequately yet succinctly. The methods and interpretations in the film are vast and disorienting, comprising a system of thought that encompasses the grandest questions of modern German and Western culture and politics. The \u201ctotal experience\u201d the director sought to inflict on the viewer aims to be punitive and transformative. In exploring his theme of \u201cHitler in us,\u201d Syberberg challenges the myths and orthodoxies of the post-World War Two order in a maximally discomforting and subversive way.<\/span><\/p>\n

But while\u00a0Hitler<\/em>\u00a0found some important admirers outside of Germany, it was overwhelmingly rejected within the country. Rather than the film serving as a precursor to professional success and expanding legitimacy, Syberberg\u2019s career as a director dwindled in the 1980s. From a position of professional and ideological marginalization, Syberberg began lashing out in interviews and essays, where his challenges to the intellectual and artistic conformity of his time became increasingly colored by antisemitic polemic.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Syberberg was born in Nossendorf, western Pomerania, northeast Germany, in 1935, of minor Prussian aristocratic stock. After a childhood in the countryside, he moved to Rostock, on the Baltic coast. Following a more traditional education than he would have received in West Germany\u2014still steeped in the luminaries of the German 19th century\u2014he headed west to study at the University of Munich, completing a doctorate in the work of Swiss playwright Friedrich D\u00fcrrenmatt.<\/span><\/p>\n

His early films from the late 1960s include pieces on contemporary German society: One is on a pornographer, another documents a hippie commune. The key artistic decade for Syberberg, however, included the\u00a0German Trilogy<\/em>\u00a0(Ludwig<\/em>:\u00a0Requiem for a Virgin King<\/em>\u00a0(1972),\u00a0Karl May<\/em>\u00a0(1974) and\u00a0Our Hitler\u00a0<\/em>(1977)), the documentary\u00a0The Confessions of Winifred Wagner\u00a0<\/em>(1975), and finally,\u00a0Parsifal<\/em>\u00a0(1982). The average run-time of these films is four and a half hours.<\/span><\/p>\n

Through these films, Syberberg examines the roots of Germany\u2019s ultimate self-banishment through Nazism. But his most important mission is to return us defamiliarized to our present condition.<\/span><\/p>\n

Syberberg targets a total consciousness reset for the viewer. The vast solemnity and ecstatically tedious sense of expanded time in his work aim to make us receptive to other worlds\u2014not for nostalgia or historical understanding, but to shock the organs of perception. He seeks to rewire the very cognitive pathways by which we relate to the present moment, aiming to make us aware of how profoundly our sense of reality is delimited by prevailing morality and hegemonic ideology. His repudiation spans leftism, liberalism, capitalism, technology, democracy, Christian morality, pluralism, and modernity itself. His goal is a form of collective mystical experience whereby the world falls away, leaving us wondering what has been lost in making it and might be gained anew if we overhaul the basis by which we relate to one another.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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King Ludwig II of Bavaria\u2019s rule was marked by his exotic aesthetic fanaticism, as his epithets \u201cthe fairy tale king\u201d and \u201cthe swan king\u201d attest. His obsessive construction of extravagant castles (for which he hired set designers as well as architects) nearly bankrupted the Bavarian state. Ludwig was deposed by his ministers after they declared him insane, before being found dead in mysterious circumstances, age 40, in Lake Starnberg.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ludwig<\/em>\u00a0takes place at the historical moment when Ludwig (played by Harry Baer) is under pressure to join the Franco-German War by statesman Otto von Bismarck, the great unifier of Germany. The campaign is victorious for the emergent Prussia-centric German Empire, but also entails the loss of Bavarian independence, and ultimately accelerates Ludwig\u2019s demise. Ludwig\u2019s ministers, led by his uncle Luitpold, grow increasingly exasperated with the king\u2019s otherworldly distance from practical responsibilities and modernity. They instead want a Bavaria focused on \u201cinvestment, international art, roads, automobiles, and connection with the empire.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Syberberg juxtaposes Ludwig\u2019s romantic grandeur with his political frivolity. Ludwig spends the film in a state of impotent lament; he sees the threats all around him yet does nothing to stop them. Instead of worldliness\u2014engaging with individuals and groups and forces he despises\u2014he withdraws into preening vanity, fey fantasies, and moody rants. He declares himself opposed to \u201cso-called progress\u201d: industrialization, nationalism, socialism, mass meetings of people. And while Syberberg depicts the nationalistic forces fueling the movement against Ludwig\u2019s quixotic reign\u2014guns, money, and beer\u2014as crass, robotic, and mediocre, he also conveys a sense of their unstoppable internal logic, as set against the king\u2019s puritanical prizing of beauty above all. This prophetic fatalism is inscribed in the image, at the outset of the film, of a bearded, tear-strewn baby Ludwig, as three Norns mockingly prophesize that he will be the final king of Bavaria.<\/span><\/p>\n

In\u00a0Ludwig<\/em>, shot on a stage with no audience, there barely exists any social dynamic between the actors. It is as if those sharing the space are on different productions: They speak into the air, not to one another. Discussions take place within earshot of others who do not hear or respond to them. Declarations are followed by dead air. It seems like the performers belong to different planes of space-time, trapped in separate tracks of history that are now impossible to cohere. The noncommunication between Germans of different ranks, perspectives, and intentions entails the beginning of turning \u201cGermany\u2019s will against Germany itself.\u201d In depicting the decomposition of dialogue to monologue, Syberberg points to the departure from shared experience to divergent paths of memory.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ludwig is a patron of Wagner, whose commercially unsuccessful work baffles his ministers, becoming another bone of contention. But Ludwig\u2019s own call for the exaltation of Wagnerian romanticism takes place in a Germany untainted by Nazism\u2014Syberberg\u2019s own quest for German cultural innocence cannot. In order to express this condition, he introduces Nazi anachronism. At one point, Hitler (who appears to have morphed from a Karl May who gives a speech praising the king) dances with a camp Ernst Rohm. When they are shooed off stage, they leave goose-stepping, arm-in-arm.<\/span><\/p>\n

The king dies twice: through a reported suicide offscreen, and then a guillotine execution\u2014after which a mob dances around his corpse, as motorcycles pull up and a woman prophesizes his return, holding up his severed head. He then reappears, yodeling, and parts his cape to expose the lederhosen underneath.<\/span><\/p>\n

The homosexual Ludwig never married or had children. His material legacy was his castles, whose glory only persisted as touristic fodder. This is represented by the projection of modern sepia-toned footage of American tourists visiting them on a backdrop as the film proceeds. The limitations and corruptions of Syberberg\u2019s current vantage point are infused with how he imagines, and depicts, the past itself. It is because Ludwig was unable to establish a tradition that Syberberg must seek, through artistic longing, the dream that the king once inspired. The impossibility of finding it becomes the film\u2019s true subject.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In\u00a0Karl May<\/em>, his next film, Syberberg takes on the most commercially popular novelist in German history. May\u2019s adventure novels set in the American West inspired an expansive sense of German heroism. His most resonant characters are Old Shatterhand, a German cowboy who serves as May\u2019s avatar, and his friend Winnetou, an Apache chief<\/strong>. As scholar Colleen Cook wrote, these characters allow \u201cthe German people, divorced from the realities of the frontier\u201d to inhabit a \u201cnatural paradise where good still triumphs over evil; where men can be men; where the ideal of the noble savage, and the apex of Western European culture mix harmoniously.\u201d May was a major inspiration for Hitler, whose admiration for the novelist only increased when he discovered that his swashbuckling content was imagined rather than drawn from personal experience.<\/span><\/p>\n

Karl May<\/em>\u2019s cast was dominated by Nazi-era performers. These included Kristina S\u00f6derbaum, icon of the Nazi Aryan aesthetic and wife of\u00a0Jud S\u00fc\u00df<\/em>\u00a0director Veit Harlan, as May\u2019s first wife; and Lil Dagover, who appeared in over 20 films during the Third Reich, which also granted her state honors, appearing as Austrian novelist Bertha von Suttner. Syberberg\u2019s casting of these figures was a darkly mischievous variation on his broader vision of film as \u201cthe continuation of life by other means.\u201d Within the dramatic context of this historical film, they explore the culture and society that existed before Nazism\u2014but their innocence as actors is rendered impossible by audience awareness of their involvement with the fascist-era film industry.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Karl May<\/em>\u00a0conceives of a society mediated by journalism, inflamed and distorted by the novelistic imagination, and steeped in litigation. Relations between individuals are increasingly managed through law and commerce, which intervene at key junctures of life. (May\u2019s first wife is incentivized to plot against him by the Munchmeyer publishing house, leading to their divorce after 30 years of marriage.) The overall direction of human affairs moves against trust and cooperation.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The author battles against a tide of accusations and lawsuits from his opponents, primarily publishers and journalists. These assaults encompass all aspects of his personal integrity and identity. Publishers attempt to control May\u2019s legacy and the capacity to re-edit and release versions of his work. Enveloped by a maelstrom of controversy, he becomes defined by the fight to shape the public persona he initially created.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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May ends the film as \u201cthe final German mystic,\u201d as a judge puts it, in a form of glory: He clears his name and pledges to establish a trust for aspiring German writers, \u201cdespite their ingratitude.\u201d He dies in his Saxon homeland next to his adoring second wife as snow falls over them. But Syberberg\u2019s beatification of the writer has an asterisk. A young Hitler attends May\u2019s final lecture in Austria in 1912, thrilled by the thought of how enthusiastic the masses will be when faced with the author in the flesh.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Syberberg\u2019s next film, a documentary, examines the story of Winifred Wagner, an orphaned English girl who came to play an important role in German cultural history. After an itinerant early childhood in England, she was adopted by Karl Klindworth, a pupil of Franz Liszt who wrote piano scores for Richard Wagner, and his wife Henriette Karop, Winifred\u2019s distant cousin. Klindworth and Karop, an elderly childless couple, reared Winifred in an intensely Germanic atmosphere. On Winifred\u2019s first visit, age 17, to the festival of Wagner\u2019s music at Bayreuth, Bavaria, she fell in love with Siegfried Wagner, son of Richard, a closeted homosexual 28 years her senior. They married and had four children. When Siegfried died in 1930, Winifred took over the management of the festival. During the Nazi era, Winifred developed a close personal bond with Hitler.<\/span><\/p>\n

She ran the festival from Wahnfried, a villa built for Richard Wagner using funds provided by Ludwig II, who also funded the festival in its early, financially troubled years. (The name compounds the words for \u201cdelusion,\u201d or \u201cmadness,\u201d and \u201cpeace\u201d in German: Wagner said this was the place where his \u201cdelusion had found peace.\u201d) Wahnfried was partly destroyed by British bombing and, for 12 years after the war, was occupied, and, she adds, looted, by American troops, who never accepted it was her private property, interpreting it instead as belonging to Hitler. Winifred fiercely opposed the denazification trials, and tried to maintain the legacy of Wagner on the estate after the war. Syberberg interviews Winifred in Wahnfried, after 30 years of near silence from her on her relationship with Hitler and the role that Wagnerian culture played during the Third Reich.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNowhere else,\u201d says Syberberg of Wahnfried in his opening voiceover, \u201cwere family history and national culture so inextricably intertwined.\u201d Syberberg wants to incorporate Winifred\u2019s testimony into the narrative, because the \u201cbrilliance and the mistakes; the private and the official\u201d are inseparable. Yet he also sees the rot coming from within that laid the groundwork for external incursion. \u201cWithout the music, without Richard Wagner\u2019s daily struggle for this music,\u201d Syberberg says, Wahnfried \u201cwas turned into a bourgeois idyll by his heirs, and perhaps just because of this, an easy prey for the Third Reich.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Winifred is a formidable presence. She begins stiffly, reading from a pre-prepared text, an extension of the pose of stern defensiveness she had adopted in the wake of the catastrophic war years. She \u201cconfesses\u201d to no crime, rejecting the very premise that she needs to. And yet Syberberg allows her a space without judgment, recording continuously (he ended up including some of the most sensitive material without her permission) and she gradually opens up.<\/span><\/p>\n

The discussion moves in many directions across five hours. There are the familial sagas. Winifred\u2019s daughter Friedland moved to America after Hitler\u2019s rise, abandoning the \u201cbeautiful confusing world of traditions\u201d she described and participating in anti-Nazi broadcasts (\u201cif we weren\u2019t Wagners, we would have been sent to the camp,\u201d Winifred says of the peril her daughter\u2019s actions put her through). Hitler cherished Winifred\u2019s children: He played with them in the garden and cuddled them in bed. Winifred\u2019s son Wieland, especially adored by Hitler, later spoke out against the F\u00fchrer, much to his mother\u2019s displeasure. There is the artistic perspective based on meticulous and subservient adherence to tradition: \u201cWhat Wagner had ordered, that was obeyed \u2026 Today a work of art is dissected \u2026 This has only started now, since the Second World War.\u201d And there is the politics\u2014Winifred\u2019s most grudging subject.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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From their first meeting in 1924, Winifred was spellbound by Hitler. He was then a \u201cnonpolitical young man\u201d who enchanted her with his \u201cvery blue, large and expressive eyes.\u201d Hitler approached Wahnfried with reverence, asking to visit Wagner\u2019s grave alone. His next visit was in 1933. For the next 12 years, he visited regularly: It was a place to rival, if not beat, Obersalzberg\u2014where he would dine, relax and hold court with his friends and guests until the early hours. During the war, Hitler insisted that the festival continue, exempting performers from the war and bringing wounded soldiers into the audience. Yet, as Winifred is keen to stress, he did not absorb Wahnfried fully into Nazism. When he returned in 1933, he issued a notice that \u201chomages in this house could only be paid to the great master Richard Wagner.\u201d He was not the predominant patron of the festival: The financial support he sent to Winifred through his personal account for each new festival production was insufficient to cover the whole cost. Despite the intense attention Hitler paid to Wagner\u2019s work, she notes that he did not seek to \u201cNazify\u201d the productions, aside from the occasional inside joke, like planting Goebbels and Goering imitators in a chorus.<\/span><\/p>\n

For Winifred, Hitler embodied \u201cabsolute Austrian tactfulness of heart and warmth.\u201d Syberberg asks her if she found anything repellant in him. \u201cThat\u2019s what\u2019s so strange,\u201d she says in a tone affirming a weary familiarity with the query, \u201cI never found anything repellant. He never caused me any disappointment. Apart from what happened outside, but that did not affect me.\u201d Most fundamentally, she insists on holding onto the validity of her memories: \u201cI am able to separate the Hitler I knew completely from what he is accused of today. All that dark side of things, I know it is there, but not for me, because I don\u2019t know that side of him.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Winifred\u2019s attempt to retain a domain of self-contained, self-justifying thought regarding Nazism and Hitler is in constant friction with the need to yield to outside definitions in light of Germany\u2019s loss. This is shown in a fascinating discussion over the term \u201cdemonic.\u201d \u201cThe effect of his personality was tremendous,\u201d she says, \u201chis enemies claimed, even demonic. But we also know the demonic in the Goethean sense. When I refer to his demonic qualities, I mean it in the Goethean sense, not in the disparaging way it is used today.\u201d Defeat and occupation would take away her capacity to make the distinction.<\/span><\/p>\n

Winifred bore the opprobrium heaped on her during the war tribunals because she didn\u2019t feel guilty of any political crime. (\u201cWhen I said I wasn\u2019t involved in politics, they all laughed,\u201d she says.) She joined the Nazi party\u2014but later during the war, and as a favor to Hitler. She praises the early Nazi movement for connecting the manual and intellectual aspects of German society, for giving the youth direction\u2014for promising \u201csalvation through a new national community.\u201d In the \u201cpostscript\u201d during the second part of the interview, however, Syberberg asks her to repeat what she told him during a reel change. She had concluded, she says with a chuckle of epiphany and a parting of her arms, that her \u201cbelief in National Socialism was solely linked with the personality of Adolf Hitler.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The discussion turns to Jews. Regarding Wagner and antisemitism, Winifred asserts that the composer sought \u201cat most\u201d a \u201cneutralization of the intellectual influence of the Jews on the political and cultural life of Germany, but he never thought of an extermination.\u201d Winifred now admits that the Nazis of course did \u201cconsiderable things\u201d (Syberberg\u2019s phrasing) against the Jews, but denies Hitler was the \u201cinitiator.\u201d Until 1939, she claims to have known of no \u201cserious cases\u201d of Jewish persecution where she had to intervene. After the war started, she passed on those petitions \u201cwhich seemed more or less credible and also worthy of help,\u201d and \u201cnever received a single refusal\u201d from the F\u00fchrer.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It took Syberberg four years to plan\u00a0Hitler<\/em>; it was shot in 20 days in a Munich sound studio, for half a million dollars, with public funding (and partial support from the BBC). It is Syberberg\u2019s own\u00a0Gesamtkunstwerk<\/em>\u00a0of German suffering: The film\u2019s techniques and methods consist of a seemingly endless array of representational forms, modes, and performances exploring the Hitler phenomenon in its totality.<\/span><\/p>\n

Projection is perhaps the most potent of Syberberg\u2019s tools: \u201cI used the front screen projection technique because I wanted to shoot the entire film in the studio. And then I thought if we do the film in this way technically, why not take over the idea of projection spiritually as well\u2014the idea of projection from the people to Hitler and from Hitler to the people.\u201d In response to the question of whether Germans were to blame for Hitler, he replied: \u201cWhat would [he] have been without us?\u201d As scholar Stephen Brockmann\u00a0put it<\/a>, Syberberg\u2019s films \u201crepresented Germany as an autistic closed circuit in which Germans \u2018loved\u2019 Hitler precisely because he served as a filmic projection of their own hopes and fears.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In an almost unbelievably powerful\u00a0montage<\/a>, Syberberg combines moments of beaming, righteous purity, and promise with those of extreme degradation. A Nazi speech announcing the Anschluss gives way to images of Hitler\u2019s parents, Hitler hugging children or surveying compliant crowds\u2014and then a German woman and a Jewish man forced to\u00a0stand<\/a>\u00a0with signs damning themselves for their relationship; pacifist essayist Carl von Ossietzky in a concentration camp; distorted faces awaiting execution.<\/span><\/p>\n

Syberberg presents these images while shattering the moral ideology that has been made to accompany them. The crescendo of fascist horror that Nazism exemplifies is a warning for potential regression against which we build a morally and ideologically coherent future. Yet Syberberg makes us aware of the way that power is imbricated within the layer upon layer of imagery that weighs on us. For him, it is the contingent fact of Nazi defeat that has made these images cohere, not objective morality.<\/span><\/p>\n

The ticking movement of these images is designed to tap into the pure experience of time felt by the Germans living through Nazism, not the outsiders assembling a stable retrospective narrative of it after it collapsed. An edgy text reimagines the image-procession from the perspective of the promised German victory rather than the retrospective German defeat:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s give him and us a chance. Brother Hitler realized what the little man of the people wanted most: to become the greatest, the old fairy tale nightmare. It needed courage to risk all radically; we might as well admit it now … Let\u2019s pretend he had\u2014we had\u2014made the atomic bomb and the rockets after all, in the end. Through the Heisenbergs and von Brauns with Furtw\u00e4ngler\u2019s music and the words of Heidegger and Benn and Hauptmann. How would we strut today at the victory celebrations in the Berlin built by Speer. The whole world as it was already once in the Olympic games. The success justifies the deeds, those are the lessons of history in the Occident and everywhere, or aren\u2019t they?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The implications of this counterfactual excursion are dizzying. Germans were not merely victimized by a top-down tyranny: They animated Hitler; he was their avatar. But the speed of the shifts between hope and horror, vindication and humiliation, victory and defeat, outflanked the capacity of Germans to grasp the eventual ramifications of Nazism. The images multiplied and morphed too quickly\u2014beyond their control, and therefore responsibility.<\/span><\/p>\n

The most powerful line in the narration is: \u201cOnly the defeat of our arms has made us turn away from him, not reason.\u201d There is a puncturing of moral self-congratulation here: an assault on the hypocrisy and cowardice of commemorating defeat as a moment of justified transformation. Had Nazi efforts been successful, Germans would have rejoiced at the absolute elevation of their race at all costs, with no consideration given to outsiders. The war only conveniently transformed into moral pedagogy post facto, as punishment for defeat.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Syberberg is not a Nazi. But it is in opposing Nazism that the most striking aspect of his perspective emerges. Syberberg ultimately objects to the Nazis more for what they did to Germany than the Jews. He wants the right to mourn for Germany, despite its crimes. This includes the belief that the real lesson of the war might be that Germans need to reconnect with their real identity without fear or shame, rather than discarding it, as per the formula: \u201cGermany equated with Auschwitz, therefore no more Germany.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the most provocative sections in the film features Himmler justifying the Shoah while he receives a massage from his physician. Himmler is not only unrepentant, but feels that genocide was a burden he deserves credit for: \u201cOur men who have participated in executions have endured much more than their victims, strange as it may sound \u2026 It was dreadful for a German to be forced to watch that, but if it wasn\u2019t dreadful, we wouldn\u2019t be Germans.\u201d<\/span>
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\nIn a\u00a0lecture<\/a>\u00a0in which he compared Syberberg to Leni Riefenstahl, British tavern orator and alt-right icon Jonathan Bowden wrote that the key to this scene is that the Shoah is \u201ctotally accepted as a fact,\u201d \u201cfor which there is no apology.\u201d This is not a denial of information, but a struggle over interpretation. Syberberg seems to accept the Holocaust as history: It is the Holocaust as ideology that he opposes. His concern is not the Holocaust; it is \u201cthe Holocaust.\u201d Syberberg\u2019s anti-guilt pledge is, says Bowden, a \u201crefusal to be imprisoned by the consequences of the destructive urge.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Hitler<\/em>\u00a0originally premiered in London, November 1977. \u201cGermany is not ready for\u00a0this<\/em>\u00a0Hitler,\u201d Syberberg said of his decision to premiere the film in London, to little attention from the German press. He turned out to be right. When the film did come home\u2014it was aired the following year at a festival and appeared on West German television in 1980\u2014it was\u00a0greeted<\/a>\u00a0with \u201calmost universal rejection.\u201d This contrasted with America as well as France, where Michel Foucault called the film a \u201cbeautiful monster\u201d and said that Syberberg had \u201cgrasped Nazism at its most seductive.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Syberberg\u2019s marginalization in Germany after\u00a0Hitler<\/em>\u00a0further circumscribed the scope of his technical means, and has entailed recourse to dramatic performances, filmed readings and monologues, and\u00a0art installations<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Sontag points out that it was\u00a0Hitler<\/em>\u2019s low budget which allowed it to \u201cremain wholly responsive to the intentions and improvisations of a single creator.\u201d Given cinema\u2019s profound relationship with money, power and narrative, Syberberg\u2019s films incorporate a sense that the lack of funding could be made to illustrate the greater ideological significance of his marginalization. The negative response to\u00a0Hitler<\/em>\u00a0allowed Syberberg to see a validation of his intellectual and political arguments against the oppressive conformism of democracy and the banality of commercialism. It opened the pathway for Syberberg\u2014who spoke of his \u201czeal in preferring the lost to the unnatural\u201d\u2014to now frame himself as a martyr to the German identity. In the process, antisemitism became more central to his defiant posture.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The TV drama\u00a0Holocaust<\/em>\u00a0was broadcast in America in 1978, and exported the next year to West Germany, at a time when open discussion of the Nazi era was growing. It was seen by around a third of the population, and broadcast with a phone-in component, in which thousands of Germans expressed their feelings and testimony to the nation, including confessions of having participated in crimes during the war. The facts of the Holocaust were brought to mass attention: The series \u201cshone a light\u201d on both the events and the silence that had followed them. It now seemed, as critic Anton Kaes wrote, \u201cGermany had to import the images of its own past from Hollywood.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Syberberg passionately despised\u00a0Holocaust<\/em>. He saw the tawdry spectacle of slipper-wearing, beer-sipping Germans wallowing in their imported own guilt and shame in front of the TV as a sign of a fundamentally unmoored culture. \u201cIn Germany, \u2018holocaust\u2019 now means Hollywood,\u201d he\u00a0lamented<\/a>, anticipating a \u201cholocaust boom.\u201d He imagined \u201con German soil,\u201d a \u201cHitler Disneyland\u201d with a rebuilt concentration camp; instead of German castles, tourists would target Hitler\u2019s house, \u201crebuilt with Jewish management.\u201d He wondered, for example, if maybe he was just \u201ctoo German\u201d to understand how Jews could \u201cmake gold out of the ashes of Auschwitz.\u201d Rather than this \u201cmarketing of our most painful emotions,\u201d Syberberg urged that \u201cwe should keep looking into ourselves, at Hitler in ourselves, at the holocaust in ourselves.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He insisted that he was \u201cnot saying this in order to forgive anyone or to diminish the guilt,\u201d but rather so that \u201cwe can carry on living.\u201d \u201cEven if you want to educate people in a political way, there\u2019s no reason to show them who\u2019s guilty, and how they are killed,\u201d he\u00a0said<\/a>. \u201cWhat for? I believe that people are always so nervous that they resort to the easiest way of looking back at their own history. I think we should be much more patient. And I think that art can be a big help.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But his goal was not merely an appeal to higher principles for their own sake, or advocating a liberal condition of permanent discussion. The\u00a0argument<\/a>\u00a0that \u201csimple anti-Fascism produces nothing\u201d was paired with unabashed calls for Germany to prevent the Holocaust from forever shaping Germany\u2019s sense of itself.<\/span>
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\n\u201cI\u2019m often asked in discussion how I justify my claim that Western culture is collapsing,\u201d he said. \u201cIn the light of this incapacity for proper mourning it\u2019s hard to believe that my answer would even be understood.\u201d Syberberg did not just see grief as a subjective response; he wrote of mourning that it \u201cneeds us\u201d\u2014as if it was an autonomous force to which the living owed something. Sontag, responding to a letter in the\u00a0NYRB<\/em>\u00a0by Doris Sommer critical of her adulatory response to\u00a0Hitler<\/em>,\u00a0wrote<\/a>: \u201cIt is not perhaps wrong for a genius to be aloof and bereaved. Is Ms. Sommer suggesting that bereavement is so inappropriate a response to the German catastrophe?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Syberberg\u2019s call for mourning asserted that essential aspects of our humanity, including some of those ostensibly represented by fascism, had been wrongly suppressed due to the Nazi catastrophe. He also asserted that the system that had won out over Nazism should be treated with contempt that is not attenuated by the badness of fascism. Syberberg sought to transcend the Nazi-anti-Nazi axis instead of negotiating its terms from within.<\/span><\/p>\n

Animated by his elitist Prussian sensibility, he began to larp as a general (looking for an army) in the culture wars. Public commentary\u2014in articles, books, and interviews\u2014allowed him to substitute verbal provocation for physical violence. He described the \u201cmerciless lust for destruction\u201d that came to him when he roamed busy streets. He wrote that he would like the opportunity to kill opponents of his work. More realistically, he later noted: \u201cI see very specific people who should be switched off. I don\u2019t mean through war now, but by saying publicly that they belong away from power. Nobody has that courage today because everyone fears for their career.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He produced a vicious\u00a0screed<\/a>, for example, against the hyperproductive, leftist, homosexual, drug-using director Rainer Werner Fassbinder after his death from accidental overdose. Syberberg said Fassbinder was the literal incarnation of everything he hated about his country, labeling him a \u201cconformist Narcissus of a broken-down Germany,\u201d \u201ca bootlicking mirror image of the German establishment\u201d who partook in an industry pact to \u201cturn the overworked formulas of the\u00a0Heimat\u00a0<\/em>film into those of the faggot film.\u201d (The attack was so vehement that he provided a postscript in which he acknowledges, without apologizing, that his wife was \u201cupset, quite rightfully\u201d with the rant.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Being denied the material opportunity to cultivate his solemn cinematic visions stripped Syberberg\u2019s arguments of artistry, leaving the raw blast of polemic. The most significant of his longer written works appeared in 1990, on the eve of German reunification.\u00a0On the Fortunes and Misfortunes of Art in Post-War Germany\u00a0<\/em>(published in English by Arktos in 2017) recast some of the central provocations of\u00a0Hitler<\/em>\u00a0into a compilation of baroque rants and personalized intellectual declarations. The book resembles a 19th-century political pamphlet and Nietzsche\u2019s more aphoristic works, but is assembled according to private rather than public logic, with bad grammar, abbreviations, and a diary or scrapbook quality. It is a kind of soliloquy in which Syberberg performs his own ideological and artistic solitude.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But it also contains direct political statements, even if mystically toned. \u201cThere is no constitutional patriotism. The\u00a0patria<\/em>\u00a0is where the graves of the fathers are,\u201d for example, has echoes of the end of Hitler\u2019s 19 July\u00a01940 Reichstag address<\/a>, which is played during\u00a0Hitler<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the Fortunes<\/em>\u00a0also contains overt criticisms of Jews:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\n\u201cWhat also drove out art in Germany after the last war was the curse of guilt, which served as an instrument of intimidation for the left, since the leftists considered themselves to be innocent and \u2013 because Hitler had persecuted the Jews \u2013 now in an unholy alliance of a Jewish leftist aesthetics against the guilty to the point of boredom and lies crippling all cultural life, so that guilt was able to become an imagination killing business, no longer fruitful but restricting, as the criterion for production and for the public, and that the apparently happy liberation from dictatorship needed the leftists from the Jews\u2019 side, and needed the Jews from the leftists\u2019 side in Western Europe. That produced, especially in Germany, from this crippled society, a neurotic explosiveness which, on account of the central position of Germany intellectually and geographically, had to have an influence on international culture. Anyone who went with the Jews or with the leftists made a career and it certainly did not have anything to do with love or understanding or, indeed, inclination. How were the Jews able to tolerate that \u2013 unless they only wanted power?\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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The book was received with\u00a0hostility<\/a>\u00a0in Germany, with Syberberg\u2019s antisemitism a focus of the outrage. This was one of the peaks of Syberberg\u2019s trouble. Yet the director retained something of a public following. After a screening of\u00a0Hitler<\/em>\u00a0in East Berlin in October 1990, on a panel that included Sontag, Ian Buruma\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0that Syberberg repeated the accusations in\u00a0On the Fortunes<\/em>, including against \u201cJewish leftists,\u201d in what Buruma depicts as \u201can almost silky tone of voice alternating with what can only be described as a theatrical tirade.\u201d His champions, \u201cshifting uneasily in their seats,\u201d acknowledged that his \u201copinions may be absurd, even offensive,\u201d but maintained that he was \u201cstill a great artist.\u201d Two years later, Syberberg\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0New York Times<\/em>: \u201cI have the feeling that my contacts in the United States have broken off.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Antisemitism is Syberberg\u2019s one unconscious act of projection. Obsessed with the decline of German culture and sovereignty, he sees Jewish power and cultural influence everywhere. Buruma describes his message thus: \u201cThe real winners of the last war are the Jews, who have regained their motherland, their ancient Heimat, the very thing the Germans have lost. And the Jews had their revenge for Auschwitz by dropping the atom bomb and atomizing the\u00a0Kultur<\/em>\u00a0of Europe through their barren, rationalist, rootless philosophy.\u201d For Syberberg, the dual blow was the pairing of the national triumph of Jews and, in his words, \u201cthe aesthetics of their diaspora which is precisely one of suffering and dispersion.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Syberberg wanted to cast off the yoke of Jewish guilt. But an interpretation of the distinct suffering of his people, with its Jewish echoes, is central to seeking a way back to the diverted path of German self-command. \u201cThe heart of Europe beats in Israel,\u201d he wrote of the post-war condition of the West. His yearning for native restoration is partly a reproduction of Zionism that needed to puncture the symbolic power of Jewish Zionism in order to serve as a counterweight to it. The Jewish state\u2019s establishment was a symbol of Gentile defeat\u2014but it might open the door to Syberberg\u2019s vision of German, or Western, cultural renaissance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Syberberg eyed this weakness: the moral and ideological potency Jews wielded, founded on their special status as a perennially persecuted minority, disappeared after the restoration of their sovereignty. Reflecting on an exhibition of Holocaust images in Israel, Syberberg said: \u201cWhen I saw all those horrible pictures and, at the same moment, young Israeli soldiers sporting machine guns standing in front of those pictures of the Holocaust, I felt really happy to realize Jews are like people everywhere.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When\u00a0asked<\/a>\u00a0about the Jewish response to\u00a0Hitler<\/em>, Syberberg remarked: \u201cA lot of Jewish people come to see the film because Hitler is their problem too. Hitler is their man, their hero, their problem. He is their black messiah. Therefore, they always want to know why and how it could be.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Following Syberberg\u2019s rant after the screening, Buruma notes that an unnamed Polish Jew, \u201chis voice trembling with quiet rage,\u201d told the director his film was \u201cdreadful.\u201d Although he had lost most of his family in the Holocaust, \u201che could almost be tempted to become a Nazi\u201d after \u201call those speeches, all that beautiful music.\u201d Syberberg claimed that at another screening in Hamburg, an \u201cold Jew\u201d came up to him and said: \u201cNow I know why I was in a concentration camp.\u201d These moments of radical disorientation (or re-orientation) of perspective appear to serve as tiny victories in Syberberg\u2019s guerilla war against the dominant narrative.<\/span><\/p>\n

To expose the losses that came with the Allied victory, Syberberg had to jostle the system in a way that would cause it to retaliate. \u201cYou have to go so deep into the wound that you are suspected,\u201d he\u00a0said<\/a>. By finding the taboos in the discourse, and therefore its weak points, Syberberg wanted to show it as just another form of power imposing its own values, not a carrier of universal moral and ideological progress. He would generate the conflict by which he could locate himself.<\/span><\/p>\n

Saying what he really thinks became Syberberg\u2019s last remaining way to be an aristocrat. He enacted his own sense of proprietorship by speaking without the self-monitoring inhibitions presented by dominant cultural institutions or the market or fear of mass judgment. He defined his own terms for what should constitute a good reputation: recalcitrant honor, not strategic conformity. He refused to tailor his artistic and rhetorical decisions to civic comity and commercial considerations. He abhorred the duplicity of free speech in a liberal democracy, when there were many things he wasn\u2019t allowed to say without suffering grave consequences. He was not seeking to secure a place for himself in the discourse merely to help nurture a culture of permanent debate. His public speech is motivated by extra-personal stakes that take precedence over individual self-interest; by the ever-dormant possibility of choosing to inherit the demands of duty.<\/span><\/p>\n

But Syberberg wasn\u2019t even sufficiently connected to his age to become a proper martyr. His films demand almost everything, making them easy to ignore: to give\u00a0Hitler<\/em>\u00a0a chance feels like submitting to it. His ideas are so wildly in excess of the practical demands of life that Syberberg struggled to get his pitch going. His thought is too extensively caveated, too free of the shared terms of the present. He is obsessed with mystery and opposes rational justification. He rejects communication in favor of communion.<\/span><\/p>\n

Syberberg eventually spoke with resignation about the combative project to which he had pledged himself. He came to feel useless even \u201cin terms of productive opposition,\u201d and that \u201chardly anyone learns anything from me anymore.\u201d Despite his prevailing tone of wistful defeatism regarding his career, Syberberg\u2019s work is becoming objectively more pertinent to the world, despite the world\u2019s indifference to it. As early as 1987, Syberberg\u00a0located<\/a>\u00a0a burgeoning shift that appears to have vindicated his grueling commitment to opposing his era: \u201cThis idea of a culture being faced with this shock and a total reversal is no longer peculiar to Germany. It represents a problem for the entire West.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Syberberg\u2019s realization that \u201cthe fight is not worth it because the people are not worth it\u201d meant less public conflagration: he left Hitler and Jews behind as subjects and retreated from the frontlines of the culture wars. A German\u00a0article<\/a>\u00a0from 2013 noted that his days of being persona non grata had long passed.<\/span><\/p>\n

He was not finished with the question of German identity. But instead of seeking purpose through confrontation, he took a journey inward, and homeward.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In 2000, Syberberg moved back to his father\u2019s manor in Nossendorf (a village with a few hundred inhabitants) having purchased the property, which the Russians had expropriated in 1947, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A 2010 German television\u00a0documentary<\/a>\u00a0found him pruning trees, arranging flowers for the breakfast table, and perusing his own archives and miscellanea from his films, partly housed in a special bunker dedicated to his career. On the second day the journalist visits, Syberberg comes to meet him at the gates of the estate, and adroitly takes a picture of him from a distance.<\/span><\/p>\n

He shows the journalist photographs of the dilapidated condition the estate was in when he regained it, with parallels to Winifred Wagner showing him images of a bombed out Wahnfried decades ago. Syberberg has documented his work on the estate (for which he received a local\u00a0prize<\/a>) through a webcam feed on his Web 1.0 style personal\u00a0website<\/a>. He has taken naturally to the private-domain aspect of the site; he sells his films from there, some of which are otherwise difficult to find, especially in translation, and has boasted of its popularity and reach.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHerzog went to America, and I leave by staying in my four walls,\u201d Syberberg\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0of their respective relations to what he saw as the barren landscape of German cinema. But withdrawal into his restored family plot found him developing more immediate ways to represent his subjects.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2017, Syberberg \u201creconstructed\u201d the Caf\u00e9 Zilm in Demmin, near Nossendorf, which he had\u00a0seen<\/a>\u00a0\u201cburning on the horizon\u201d during the war. His project saw a replica fa\u00e7ade placed over the building where the caf\u00e9 stood; it was \u201copen\u201d for two weeks, with visitors being led to an ad hoc arrangement of tables and chairs behind the facade. This was not a rebuilding: A news report notes there was \u201cno foundation, no wall.\u201d But Syberberg still sought to control whatever he could: The cakes, for example, were provided by people from the area, not delivered by bakeries. \u201cEverything will,\u201d he was\u00a0quoted<\/a>\u00a0as saying before the launch, \u201chave a local connection.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Mardean Isaac<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>was born in London to Assyrian parents from Iran and Iraq. He studied English at Cambridge University and Syriac Studies at Oxford University. He is currently writing a novel.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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My Favorite Antisemite: Hans-J\u00fcrgen Syberberg MARDEAN ISAAC The director\u2019s films tackled the grandest questions in German culture and politics, before he turned his critical eye to the Jews. . Hans-J\u00fcrgen Syberberg, Germany, circa 1980UNITED ARCHIVES GMBH\/ALAMY My Favorite Anti-Semite: an occasional series of tributes to writers, artists, philosophers, and others who hate us and to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96802"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=96802"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96818,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96802\/revisions\/96818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=96802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=96802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=96802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}