On Syberberg's Hitler

I have been struggling with Syberberg's Hitler, A Film from Germany for the last couple of days. I don't think I will be able to see the whole film. It is daunting not just because of its length (seven hours) but the sheer breadth of critical, historical and cultural resources it draws on. I am not the intended viewer of the film it seems. Reading Susan Sontag's brilliant essay on it is also not enough though it might be a very good start.

Just a couple of fragmentary thoughts. One of Syberberg's main aims in the film is to explore the various ways Hitler retroactively haunts European culture. Syberberg is of course not the first artist to have done this but the audio-visual medium of cinema and its attendant complexities does give his indictment a kind of immediacy and hence power which a more dispassionate academic study can't have. He is convinced that one can't separate European culture from the European crimes. (Hitler is not the only one - there is also imperialism and communism both of which get short shrift in these kinds of discussions but then in this case they are not its subject). At a basic level, the film can be said to be an interpretation of a particularly despairing version of philosophy of history which sees in Hitler a culmination of European civilization. Syberberg is not the first German intellectual to propose this, even before Hitler many German philosophers were writing treatises in this apocalyptic and eschatological vein.

Another important motif of the film is the way it treats Hitler not a person with a special existent in place or time but rather as an Idea or a representation which just got embodied in the persona of historical Hitler once. The film through various monologues, speeches, historical and cultural analogies tries to pin down what this idea of Hitler might be.

Susan Sontag says in her essay:

Syberberg asks that we really listen to what Hitler said—to the kind of cultural revolution Nazism was, or claimed to be; to the spiritual catastrophe it was, and still is. By Hitler Syberberg does not mean only the real historical monster, responsible for the deaths of tens of millions. He evokes a kind of Hitler-substance that outlives Hitler, a phantom presence in modern culture, a protean principle of evil that saturates the present and remakes the past. Syberberg's film alludes to familiar genealogies, real and symbolic: from Romanticism to Hitler, from Wagner to Hitler, from Caligari to Hitler, from kitsch to Hitler. And, in the hyperbole of woe, he insists on some new ones: from Hitler to pornography, from Hitler to the soulless consumer society of the Federal Republic, from Hitler to the rude coercions of the DDR.

His denunciation of consumer societies and commercialism (taking Hollywood as an example) left me perplexed and unconvinced. I even found them bizarre on many occasions. I am of course not a fan of consumerism at all and there is indeed a disease of soullessness that is common to both isms but this strain of argument didn't fit very well with the rest of the film. Zygmunt Bauman is more convincing in his critique of consumerist society as a continuum of societies functioning under fascism.

I will try to revisit it sometime in future after (hopefully) I am able to accumulate the necessary critical mass of knowledge that seems to be prerequisite to watching it. I also need to develop an appreciation of Wagner's music. Unlike Woody Allen he doesn't make me want to invade Poland, he just gives me a terrible headache. I had to lower down the volume while watching but I still couldn't go on after a while.

Susan Sontag's essay on the film is really one of her finest, worth reading even if you haven't seen the film. An extract here:


Although Syberberg draws on innumerable versions and impressions of Hitler, the film in fact offers very few ideas about Hitler. For the most part they are the theses formulated in the ruins of post-World War II Germany: the thesis that "Hitler's work" was "the eruption of the satanic principle in world history" (Meinecke's The German Catastrophe, written two years before Doctor Faustus); the thesis, expressed by Max Horkheimer in an essay written just after the war, that Hitler was the logical culmination of Western progress. Starting in the 1950s, when the ruins were rebuilt, more complex theses—political, sociological, economic—prevailed about Nazism. (Horkheimer, for example, repudiated his essay.) In reviving those unmodulated views of thirty years ago, their indignation, their pessimism, Syberberg's film makes a strong case for their moral appropriateness.

Syberberg asks that we really listen to what Hitler said—to the kind of cultural revolution Nazism was, or claimed to be; to the spiritual catastrophe it was, and still is. By Hitler Syberberg does not mean only the real historical monster, responsible for the deaths of tens of millions. He evokes a kind of Hitler-substance that outlives Hitler, a phantom presence in modern culture, a protean principle of evil that saturates the present and remakes the past. Syberberg's film alludes to familiar genealogies, real and symbolic: from Romanticism to Hitler, from Wagner to Hitler, from Caligari to Hitler, from kitsch to Hitler. And, in the hyperbole of woe, he insists on some new ones: from Hitler to pornography, from Hitler to the soulless consumer society of the Federal Republic, from Hitler to the rude coercions of the DDR.

In using Hitler thus, there is some truth and some unconvincing attributions. It is true that Hitler has contaminated romanticism and Wagner, that much of nineteenth-century German culture is, retroactively, haunted by Hitler. (As, say, nineteenth-century Russian culture is not haunted by Stalin.) But it is not true that Hitler engendered the modern, post-Hitlerian plastic consumer society. That was already well on the way when the Nazis took power. Indeed it could be argued—contra Syberberg—that Hitler was in the long run an irrelevance, an attempt to halt the historical clock; and that communism is what ultimately mattered in Europe, not fascism. Syberberg is more plausible when he asserts that the DDR resembles the Nazi state, a view for which he has been denounced by the left in West Germany. Like most intellectuals who grew up under a communist regime and moved to a bourgeois-democratic one, he is singularly free of left-wing pieties.

Syberberg's notion of history as catastrophe recalls the long German tradition of regarding history moralistically, as the history of the spirit. Comparable views today are more likely to be entertained in Eastern Europe than in Germany. Syberberg has the moral intransigence, the lack of respect for literal history, the heartbreaking seriousness of the great illiberal artists from the Russian empire—with their fierce convictions about the primacy of spiritual over material (economic, political) causation, the irrelevance of the categories "left" and "right," the existence of absolute evil. Appalled by the extensiveness of the German support for Hitler, Syberberg calls the Germans "a Satanic people."


And her final recommendation


Syberberg is a genuine elegiast who knows how to use the allegorical props, the symbols and talismans of melancholy. But his film is tonic. The poetic, husky-voiced, diffident logorrhea of Godard's late films discloses a morose conviction that speaking will never exorcise anything, and an inhibition of feeling, both of sympathy and repulsion, that results from this sense of the impotence of speaking. Syberberg, with a temperament that seems the opposite of Godard's, has a supreme confidence in language, in discourse, in eloquence itself. The result is a film altogether exceptional in its emotional expressiveness, its novel aesthetic, its visual beauty, its moral passion, its concern with contemplative values.

The film tries to say everything. Syberberg belongs to the race of creators like Wagner, Artaud, Céline, the late Joyce, whose work annihilates other work. All are artists of endless speaking, endless melody—a voice that goes on and on. (Beckett would belong to this race too were it not for some inhibitory force—sanity? elegance? good manners? less energy? deeper despair?) Syberberg's unprecedented ambition in Hitler, A Film from Germany is on another scale than anything one has seen on film. It is work that demands a special kind of attention and partisanship; and invites being reflected upon, reseen. The more one recognizes of its stylistic references and lore, the more the film vibrates. Syberberg's film belongs in the category of noble master-pieces which ask for fealty and can compel it. After seeing Hitler, A Film from Germany, there is Syberberg's film—and then there are the other films one admires. (Not too many these days, alas.) As was said ruefully of Wagner, he spoils our tolerance for the others.