HANS R. VAGET1

9. SYBERBERG’S OUR HITLER, WAGNERIANISM, AND ALIENATION: A RE-VIEWING

I.

In the years since its first showing in London, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s monumental 1977 film about Hitler has come to be regarded as perhaps the most ambitious and serious contribution by an artist to the debate about Hitler and German history. Not since Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde (Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, Told by a Friend, 1947) and Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959) have we been made to look back at the “German catastrophe” of Nazism in such a provocative and imaginative manner. The critical reaction to Hitler—Ein Film aus Deutschland (Hitler, A Film from Germany, a.k.a. Our Hitler) has been very mixed. Syberberg met with almost universal rejection in Germany and with much, at times enthusiastic, acclaim outside Germany, particularly in America and France, where his film was hailed as Faust, Part III. In the United States, Susan Sontag wrote a passionately partisan yet greatly illuminating essay about Our Hitler in The New York Review of Books (February 1980). She judged it a masterpiece of “unprecedented ambition.” “After seeing Hitler, A Film from Germany,” she writes, “there is Syberberg’s film—and there are other films one admires.” Those who have criticized or condemned this film have done so not only for what it appears to be saying about Adolf Hitler and the Germans’ relationship to Hitler, but also for how the phenomenon of Nazism and the figure of Hitler have been cinematically realized. Much of the criticism was directed at the picture’s excessive length (over seven hours and in four parts: Der Graal [The Grail], Ein deutscher Traum [A German Dream], Das Ende eines Wintermärchens [The End of a Winter Fairy Tale], and Wir Kinder der Hölle [We Children of Hell]), its unabashed Wagnerianism, its mania for quotations, parodies, and allusions, and, above all, its refusal to engage in any kind of sustained discourse on Hitler in sociological, economic, or moral terms. It is indeed the form of Our Hitler that poses the most challenging questions for the critic. At first viewing one cannot help feeling bewildered. Syberberg treats us to a dazzling display of theatrical tricks involving puppets, ventriloquists, and actors as they take turns playing the key parts; he showers us with an unending, cleverly assembled collage of texts by and about Hitler; he provides a sophisticated montage of contrasting soundtracks ranging from Nazi songs and marches to Mozart, Wagner,

R. J. Cardullo (Ed.), Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, the Film Director as Critical Thinker, 113–130. © 2017 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. H. R. Vaget and Mahler; and he overwhelms us with a complex system of pictorial quotations and cross-references such as have never before been seen on the screen. Yet many viewers and critics believe that Syberberg’s efforts are self-defeating, since, it is alleged, he fails to come to grips with historical reality. This was, as Henry Pachter charged in Cineaste (April 1980), merely Syberberg’s Hitler and not the Hitler of historians and sociologists—and, above all, not our Hitler. The point is absurd, I believe, because it fails to recognize that, appearances to the contrary, Syberberg’s approach to Hitler is artistic and not documentary. Our Hitler, like the studio in which the entire film was shot and whose existence we are not allowed to forget, creates an oppressive atmosphere. It launches us on a journey into the interior of the collective German soul such as Novalis (a.k.a. Friedrich von Hardenberg) undertook poetically—the same Novalis who is cited as an artistic precursor in the opening sequence of the picture. Consequently, the reality of Nazi Germany as we know it from newsreels, history books, and statistics is relegated to the background and subordinated to the logic of Syberberg’s fictions-cum-conjectures about Hitler. Naturally, we are bound to wonder about the ideological implications of such a method. If it is the purpose of this film to make us remember what led to the rise of Hitler, that purpose seems to be ill-served, if not counteracted, by the artistic strategies employed here. Indeed, why did Syberberg not make a more modest and “factual” film? Has the effectiveness of traditional cinema in treating the horror of Nazism not been proven by the success and impact of the Holocaust television series (4 parts, 1978)? Would it not have been more appropriate for Syberberg, artistically as well as morally, to focus on the victims rather than the killers? Why—to cite just one striking example— dwell for over half an hour on the face and belly of Heinrich Himmler, whom we see being massaged to alleviate the pain he feels from watching, and presiding over, the mass killing of Jews? Why make us listen to a long, obscene monologue by Himmler extolling the discipline, the decency, and the secret suffering of his henchmen, while their victims are kept silent, anonymous, and almost invisible? Such sequences cast a long shadow over Syberberg’s intentions and integrity. The suspicion that he might merely be exploiting the Hitler boom, that he in effect glorifies what he intended to analyze, has been raised repeatedly. One can see why. Nonetheless, such suspicions or insinuations are quite misleading; they indicate a misunderstanding of the film’s extraordinary artistry and a lack of familiarity with the technique of alienation (a.k.a. estrangement or defamilarization) in cinema. This is not one of those well-intentioned anti-Nazi films overflowing with political moralizing, or a documentary in the manner of Joachim Fest’s Hitler—eine Karriere (Hitler, A Career)—like Our Hitler, from 1977. Syberberg’s picture marks a radical departure from those models, for he does not attempt to present a rational explanation for the sociological, economic, and ideological causes of Nazism. Instead, he tackles the more difficult task of reconstructing the irrationality that made the rise of Adolf Hitler possible.

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