hans-jurgen syberberg’s “hitler, a film from germany”

i am a total novice to syberberg. upon reading favorable reactions, formal criticism and ideological attacks on this film and the director, my own take on this work of hubristic excess may as well be in a vacuum as i do not have the history, familiarity or informed stance on the director or his politics. this is mostly unimportant. in my criticism of the other films i’ve watched so far, i have little idea, at best, of the sensibilities of the director. i’m of a mind that a great film can speak for itself – a film that is 7h 9m has got so much to say that whatever i can bring to the film as far as my cultural referents can suffice. this film covers so much ground that it’s impossible not to react to it, no matter the level of your familiarity or engagement with the subject matter.

if there’s one basic truism i can take away from the criticism on this film after the fact, it’s that the manichean take on evil is reductive and insufficient. it rewards the uncritical, venerates the unthinking, it justifies the existence of bone-evil but can never explain or understand it. from the film itself, manicheanism is useless, simplistic junk, the multiplicity of perspective puts lie to it. a lot of the reaction to the film is seemingly moralistic, that the film violates a taboo by not only humanizing hitler, but sympathizing with him and even exonerating him. by the filmmakers admission, this is to indict the body politic that lifted him up. by casting hitler as the first man created by film, the man of the 20th century, suddenly, the bystander is complicit. in this film, the volk, past, present and future, is on trial for surrendering history and culture to mesmerists and astrologists.

the carnivalesque of the 4 acts renders the nazi period as a grand farce, each skit and soliloquy laden with  grotesque irony. the wagnerian soundtrack soars nostalgically amidst tours of nazi party fineries and neo-classical architecture. often in the foreground, the runes and totems of the party alternate with mannequins dressed as the common deutschlander, the businessman, the ss agent, the man on the street. these sequences are all conversations with the dead, among the dead. the symbolism of the dead discoursing freely was a powerful statement in the context of a then-divided germany, it suggests that the weight of guilt alone cannot exorcise the past. the past is the present; it must be negotiated and reconciled. if one narrative dominates, history just becomes that narrative and nothing else.

one of syberberg’s many arguments is that the emptiness of commercialism was as detestable as any of the reich’s excesses. this is where he is seen as an apologist for the regime, where the nazi era united the german character, the resultant identity crisis postwar was a fugue. what makes this perspective so unsavory is that we are so used to the history of the german state being reported from without, rather than within. syberberg’s invocation of the liberal/jewish narrative is interpreted as perjorative because his perspective lies with the perpetrator-by-proxy, i.e. the german people who democratically elected the nazi party into power. far from arguing for the return of nationalism and racial supremacy, his target is the banal consumerism that characterized western germany. his moral objection is that the baby was thrown out with the bathwater, a repugnant ideology with an arguably utopian substance was discarded for substanceless, dehumanizing materialism. this is where the nazi past connects to the debased present, where ideas are prostituted and devalued for commerce.

this is the irony of the juxtaposition of the officialized multimedia narrative of the party. in seizing the past for themselves, the party and its leaders defile culture, appropriating artworks and music in a wager to make philosophy actionable. the cruel trick is that this poisonous ideology does appropriately honor the conquerors and tyrants of the past. the neo-classicalism is grandiose, yes, but not a gross misappropriation. in honoring themselves, we remember the conquerors and tyrants, any ploy to abolish history is done so with the knowledge that memory and legacy can be manipulated. in the same way, the choosing of a rune and attendant symbols to abstract the political is both forward looking and backward looking in the way the sinister nazi mythology intended. their commercial offspring – puma, volkswagen and the like, are all too aware of the power of branding to self-mythologize, to make oneself part of a cultural pantheon with striking design and effective sloganeering. in this way, the nazi legacy is unending. far from flattering to the mea culpas and handwashings of the postwar world, syberberg resists the obvious, which would be to disconnect this movement from any continuum and treat it as though it were some aberration. a central assertion in this film is that history is a conspiracy, a “film of memories” in which confused, disparate threads are pulled together to form a narrative, not so much recorded or remembered but cast as in a play or film.

is that the central controversy of this film? that audiences cannot view this film with the expectation that it will congratulate them for finding the ideology repugnant or laughable? after all, only the figure of hitler is caricatured (and even then, he is still referred to as a fraternite). the ideology is presented as intended; a grandiose message with an equally strident soundtrack. the equivocation can be attacked blindly, in light of the fact that syberberg sets his film as against opportunistic and arrogant moralism that hypocritically exploits the suffering of the third reich’s victims for a horrorshow while condemning the perpetrators. in the spacey wanderings that permeate the film, is syberberg proposing some sort of holistic reconciliation with dead monsters? can this film be taken as an accidental apologia for supremacists in its zeal to condemn reactionary critics? it’s difficult to say, given the ambiguity of the affection for the idealized past of Germany with its ubermensch peasant, forever toiling for love of his fellows. it’s hard to determine whether this nostalgia is genuine – there are the wistful episodes at the eagle’s nest that gaily recount the mundane details of hitler’s schmoozing and late naps, but there is also a skit where hitler, the soul of germany, is played as peter lorre’s killer in m, consumed by the pathological desire to despoil. syberberg posits that righteousness didn’t silence hitler and reason didn’t defeat him. he is a phantom that haunts the present. to tell a simple narrative about that history encircles it and divorces it from the present.

yet the film avows itself of a simple reactionary stance by it’s sheer breadth. it covers so many interpretations that it resists the attempt to paint it as polemical. what syberberg has done is much more substantial than simplistic sermonizing, dynamiting an easy narrative and in its place, erecting an uneasy narrative that refuses the easy contentment of cursing the condemned. this is a work of art that transcends its politics. 4 stars.

watch it here