After some four decades in which Germany was almost totally absent from the world cinema as a seminal force—decades during which waves of Italian, French, Swedish, and even Japanese films beat upon American shores—there has been a surprising turnabout. At the recent Los Angeles International Film Exposition (FILMEX), the largest and most comprehensive film festival in North America, huge lines formed outside the Plitt Theater in Century City for almost all new German films—unreviewed, unheralded, many of them made by directors no one had even heard of. The word “German” was enough to draw the crowd.
One Saturday night, for Der Mädenkrieg (“The Girls’ War”), which the FILMEX catalogue informed members “used the genre of the ‘woman’s picture’ of the 1940’s” to tell the story of World War II, adding that “one could almost be settling comfortably into a movie with Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland,” attendance was mediocre. Which is to say that the 1,400-seat theater was merely full. But on another Saturday night, for Deutschland, bleiche Mutter (“Germany, Pale Mother”), when audiences were promised the “cancerous spreading of Nazi fervor,” a “searing condemnation,” a story “symbolizing the fallen country itself,” fever was in the air, scalpers were reselling tickets outside, an excited throng filled the theater to bursting. Similarly, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Our Hitler, A Film From Germany—in which Hitler is described somewhat bizarrely as “the greatest film-maker of all time” and which contains a powerful, even exuberant strain of Nazi mysticism—is now proceeding through the land, thanks to the sponsorship of Francis Ford Coppola, on the loftiest and most exclusive release pattern of any movie in U.S. history ($24 top at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in New York followed by a mere $12 at Hunter College and the Beacon Theater).
The forty-year hiatus in German films deemed worthy of interest abroad is a remarkable event in itself. Germany, after all, along with the United States, Russia, and France, was one of the countries whose national artistic genius most powerfully contributed to the creation of the new art. The conventional explanation lays responsibility for the hiatus at the door of Hitler, who cut the thread, extinguished liberty, drove most of the great German talents abroad. Still, Hitler was in power for only twelve years. What of the quarter-century which followed the Nazi collapse in 1945? Should not new talent have sprung up? World War II hardly caused the Japanese cinema to pause for breath. In fact, Japan produced an impressive number of distinguished films even under Tojo and the Thought Police. Following World War II, starting almost from scratch, important new film-makers emerged in Brazil, and even in India. Most interesting of all, directors in the Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe, forced to deal with an imposed totalitarian system and censorship as formidable as those of Nazi Germany itself—but taking advantage of the zigs and zags of Soviet policy, the sometimes greater, sometimes lesser, desire of the USSR to win the good will of its subject peoples—were tireless in their attempts to make movies of high artistic quality. At one time or another, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia all produced films admired the world over. But still from Germany only the barest trickle. My own feeling is that if Hitler is to be held responsible for this, it is not simply for Nazi film censorship, the “cutting of the thread,” but rather for the profound cultural and emotional shock that everything the Nazis did produced in the German nation.
In any event, it is a verifiable fact that of all the great Western countries, West Germany has generated the most fervent demand for cheap, often saccharine, “escapist” entertainment in the cinema. During the first two or three years after the war, there were German films about the Nazi years, as there were books and articles in the popular press, satisfying the curiosity of Germans about what their great war chiefs had been up to in private, what they had “really” been like. But once this curiosity was satisfied, the Germans had had enough. They had no desire to hear about the millions dead, the wanton destruction and inhuman persecution, the horror, shame, guilt, responsibility. They wanted entertainment. And it wasn’t simply that they wanted no more pictures about the Nazi past. I feel, myself, that German repression of the Nazi past produced a marked distaste for reality and truthfulness to life, regardless of where the story was located or whether it took place in past, present, or future.
The only vaguely comparable case I know of was the American cinema of the Depression—when, in fact, the word “escapist” was coined—and this was entirely without any feeling of national guilt, the world being simply too frightful to be portrayed realistically, at least in mass entertainment. (I am not an admirer of the American cinema of the Depression years.) So Germany has had its own Heimatfilme—native films—all this time, destined for home consumption and escapist to the bone. And now that the German generation with a living memory of the Nazis and their works is passing away (at least passing out of the movie houses), we have a new German cinema, a so-called Neue Welle (New Wave), created in angry reaction to all those years of vapid escapism.
It is not widely recognized in the United States that most of these new German movies that have been arriving in America, and the Neue Welle as a whole—as represented, for example, in the work of Werner Herzog (Aguirre, the Wrath of God), Wim Wenders (The American Friend), Alexander Kluge (Yesterday Girl), and Rainer Werner Fassbinder—are what we would call underground films. Commercially speaking, the old escapist cinema still holds sway in Germany. Thus the view Americans are getting of German movies is roughly comparable to that of a European film buff who knows such American directors as Paul Morissey (Flesh, Heat, Trash) Claudia Weill (chronicler of Shirley MacLaine’s trip to China and director of Girl Friends), and perhaps Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda (Easy Rider), but who has not only never seen any films with Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, Robert Redford, or Al Pacino, but has never even heard of them.
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Not typical of the movement in many ways is Volker Schlöndorff, whose latest film, The Tin Drum, an adaptation of the celebrated Günter Grass novel, has been a great success on the international market (winning this year’s Academy Award for the best foreign-language film) and ranked for a time in the number-one place on the German box-office charts—a feat which no director even half-associated with the Neue Welle has come anywhere near matching.
Schlöndorff holds a position in the Neue Welle similar to the one occupied by Alain Resnais (Hiroshima, Mon Amour; Last Year in Marienbad) in the French Nouvelle Vague. As exemplified by Truffaut, Chabrol, and Godard, the Nouvelle Vague was characterized by sincerity and innocent ardor expressed in a technique that ranged from simple to clumsy—a style thought fitting for the expression of unabashed, direct youthful feeling. But Resnais’s style was polished, immaculate, oblique, allusive. I remember the debates to this day: is Resnais a member of the Nouvelle Vague?
So with Schlöndorff. His film technique is clean and accomplished, particularly compared with his Neue Welle compatriots, most of whom are not so much clumsy as positively slovenly. He is literate; most of them are brash. His politics on the face of it seem more moderate than theirs, but this moderation is only relative, as can be seen from a simple listing of the subjects of his films. His first, Young Törless, was an adaptation of a novel by Robert Musil about the sufferings of a sensitive youth at a German military school: Schlöndorff as a German anti-militarist. His next film was Michael Kohlhaas, from the Kleist tale, the story of a 17th-century German fighting for justice against the powers-that-were, a script into which a sizable amount of modern revolutionary “relevance” was inserted. Then came a women’s-liberation film, starring his wife, a feminist militant named Margarethe von Trotta, in which the vilest thing that seems to happen to the wife of a successful lawyer after she leaves him is that she is forced to go out and work alongside male sales clerks—which is to say that she does not automatically retain her husband’s position in the affluent class.
Schlöndorff next made an adaptation of a Heinrich Böll novel, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, a highly polemical attack on abuses of the free press in West Germany, specifically the politically conservative Springer press. I myself could not find a word in the film which conveyed the notion (to recast the problem in American terms) that the National Inquirer, as it were, is the price we pay for the Washington Post. All stops were out for Schlöndorff’s next-to-last film, Coup de Grâce, a wildly romantic elegy to a Bolshevik rising in Germany’s Baltic provinces.
The Tin Drum itself is a faithful, literal, uninspired translation of the novel to the screen. We have a collection of passable acting performances, undistinguished camera work. The symbolism is, of course, the same. After the Nazis have come to power, Oskar, a three-year-old child in Danzig (Grass’s home town), coolly throws himself from a cellar staircase, damaging perhaps his pituitary gland and preventing his further growth, thus marking his separation, and that of the high German culture, from the monstrous Germany a-growing. As we follow the adventures of this permanent child, ingeniously freed from the onerous obligation to become a German soldier or to take part in any other way in the Nazi madness, we are shown the traditional German wallowing in food, mildly repellent, so often satirized by German free spirits. Next we have a bit of mildly repellent sex. What we do not have is the author’s “voice.”
In reading The Tin Drum, we do not see a real eternal three-year-old, any more than in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis we see a man changed into a real cockroach, or in Bulgakov’s The Heart of a Dog (a wonderful parody of the Soviet vision of the perfectibility of man), a real rat-chasing alley mongrel elevated precariously to human status. In the movie version of The Tin Drum we have nothing to fix our eyes on but a blank-faced child actor named David Bennent. Film directors are nowhere near as helpless as stage directors when faced with the problem of attempting a directorial equivalent of a writer’s style, and there are a number of virtuoso directors whose language of expression in their own medium is individual, at least achieving a distinctive artistic personality. This is not the case with Volker Schlöndorff, and it is certainly not the case with Volker Schlöndorff being kept on a tight leash—and by all accounts totally intimidated—by Günter Grass, who retained story control over the picture.
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If there is some question about Schlöndorff’s membership in the Neue Welle, there is none at all about Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s. In fact, all students of the matter agree that he is the central and dominant figure of the movement.
What is one to say of this demiurge who, after an entire generation, has been chosen to rekindle the flame of German film culture? A militant homosexual, Fassbinder dresses in faded jeans and black leather jackets, like a Hell’s Angel. He has been known to erupt in paeans of praise to the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group, and has appeared naked in some of his own movies. He grinds out four films a year regularly, shooting at the speed of a television director, and, attempts at elegance notwithstanding, by and large his films look it. He acknowledges as his master none other than Douglas Sirk, author of such quintessential Hollywood trash as Imitation of Life with Lana Turner and Magnificent Obsession with Rock Hudson.
His own films seem to be mostly about dominance. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is typical. Three lesbians are enclosed in a small apartment. Petra (Margit Carstensen) dominates the scene until she falls in love with another, younger lesbian (Hanna Schygulla). The ascendance this gives the younger woman incapacitates Petra completely, and it is only when she succeeds in breaking out of the tyranny of love that her subjugation by the younger woman is brought to an end. For Fassbinder is no friend of love, affirming that it is “the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression.” Well, this is at least a refreshing shift from the day when the bards and minstrels of the counterculture were chattering about nothing but love, love, love.
Fassbinder’s latest film to appear in America, The Marriage of Maria Braun, is his first to achieve a substantial commercial success. In this country it has been hailed as a masterpiece, although a suspicious amount of praise has gone to its leading lady, the same Hanna Schygulla who subjugated Petra von Kant and who has now been compared with Marlene Dietrich and Jean Harlow, and called “sweet,” “tough,” “splendid,” and “mysterious:” She has also been said to reach “a new level of sexual knowingness.” Certainly a good deal of the time she strides about assertively in her underwear, which invariably features a black garter belt.
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As to the film itself, once again, alas, as so often in these new German films, we are up to our necks in allegory. In the opening scene, the young Maria Braun is being married to a German soldier in the midst of a World War II aerial bombardment. All is leaden and schematic, and the acting here (as throughout the film) is stilted and wooden. The soldier goes off to war and Maria does a bit of black-marketeering. Germany is immediately defeated and Maria gets a job as a bar girl in an off-limits tavern. Since the main conquering power is the United States, she takes up with an American army sergeant, and to add greater richness, the sergeant is black. Maria’s husband returns from the war and finds the two making love, whereupon Maria, somewhat bafflingly, hits the sergeant on the head with a bottle and kills him (Germany resurgent?). But in a stroke worthy of Fassbinder’s master, Douglas Sirk, Maria’s husband takes the rap, going to prison for murder in her place.
Then begins the picture’s real story: the rise of Maria, and Germany, from the economic ashes. Maria picks up a French industrialist on a train (the French-German alliance being the heart of the new Europe), becomes his mistress, assistant, and finally second-in-command. The financial ascent of Maria shows all the knowledgeability of the workings of big business of one of the more practical Horatio Alger books. Although remaining the mistress of the French industrialist, Maria continues to visit her husband in prison, and when the two men meet at one point, the industrialist congratulates the husband for being the recipient of “true love.” (This means, still allegorically I suppose, that the new, postwar Germany, of which Maria Braun is a dishearteningly simple symbol, is still bonded and devoted to the essence of the old, Nazi, Germany symbolized by her wartime soldier husband. Since in Fassbinder’s view love is subjugation, this, in turn, seems to mean that in the rise of the new Germany from the ashes, it is the old Germany that has triumphed.)
In the closing scenes of the movie, to the voice of Konrad Adenauer on TV, Maria inherits the Frenchman’s fortune, her husband is released from prison, and the two Brauns are reunited in power and opulence. But as if the turns of the plot were not unrealistic enough, the film has a trick ending. The flame is extinguished on the stove in Maria’s kitchen while the gas continues to escape, hissing. Maria strikes a match to light a cigarette. There is an explosion. And that’s the end of Maria.
There has been a small debate about this ending, some maintaining that Maria ignites the explosion deliberately. I find this completely impossible to believe as she shows no sign whatsoever of contrition, and does not look one bit like a woman about to commit suicide. Others put the explosion down to accident, but as meaning that this new German prosperity contains the seeds of its own destruction (yet to come, of course). One analyst proclaimed, “It doesn’t make any difference.” And from one point of view at least it does not, there being no question whatever that Rainer Werner Fassbinder deeply desires the destruction of this new Germany.
Thus: Fassbinder, the most influential German director on the world scene since the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl (The Triumph of the Will). He lives in West Germany, but is not grateful for the artistic freedom this affords him. He has received many grants and subsidies from the West German government, but has not let this inhibit his gleeful eagerness to attack “the system.” He is thirty-three, has made some 35 feature films. As a film-maker he is serious, supremely self-confident, hardworking but impatient, slapdash, adolescent, strikingly ungifted. To say that he is not strongly attached to democratic institutions is an austere understatement.
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But even Fassbinder is no preparation for Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, whose Our Hitler, A Film From Germany bids fair, for at least a season or so, to be the Finnegans Wake of cinema. By this I mean that it is a “difficult” work, which will be seen by only a few thousand people in this country (and whose very nature excludes a larger audience), but that the ardor and erudition of its admirers are such as to give it a position of great respect.
Syberberg is quick to dissociate himself from the members of the Neue Welle, and they are as eager to dissociate themselves from him. They are all from the western provinces of the old Germany; Syberberg is a Prussian. They grew up in the West, he in the East. He fled to West Germany at the age of eighteen (and, if nothing else, is singularly free of Communist pieties). Except for Alexander Kluge, they were all born at, or after, the end of World War II; Syberberg was already ten at the time of the German defeat, and has clear recollections of Nazi Germany. They are all strung out somewhere on the radical Left, he is a champion of the mystical Right. Fassbinder and the other members of the Neue Welle were clearly not meant to be fast friends of Syberberg, united, as they are, only by their common contempt for the values of present-day West Germany.
Our Hitler, A Film From Germany, called by Susan Sontag “one of the great works of the 20th century” is, and is meant to be, intimidating. Its seven-and-a-half-hour length alone is a defiant challenge. The average commercial movie is before the camera three months, a long day’s work usually producing something like two minutes of screen time. The director shoots and cuts, shoots and cuts, then cuts and cuts and cuts and cuts, to prepare his finished film. Syberberg would have none of this, and directed his entire seven-and-a-half-hour film in only twenty days, with no cuts, nothing eliminated, working with brazen confidence that everything he went to the trouble of shooting was worth showing to the audience. There is no modesty here of any sort. The spectator knows that the author views the film as a concluding section of a trilogy of which the two first parts are earlier Syberberg films on mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, Wagner’s patron and builder of fanciful castles, and Karl May, Germany’s Zane Grey, two earlier “German dreamers.” The program (for there is a program) announces that the Hitler “cycle” will be in four parts, imposingly and romantically titled: “The Grail,” “A German Dream,” “The End of Winter’s Tale,” “We Children of Hell.” The spectator is aware even during the film’s opening frames that he is seeing a work of hugely serious intent. But what is he actually seeing?
Not much. The whole movie takes place on a single sound stage, and little is done to make it look like anything other than a sound stage. If the principal locus of the film evokes anything, it is a shabbily equipped off-Broadway theater attempting to do Wagner. What little live action there is takes place in front of rear-projection transparencies of Ludwig’s palace in Munich, deserted chambers of the Reich Chancellery, Berchtesgaden, the streets of Berlin. These are deliberately unprepossessing so as not to distract from the discourses we are to hear.
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When the set is deployed in three dimensions as on a stage, it contains, typically: department-store dummies, sometimes in Nazi uniform; a puppet or ventriloquist’s dummy of Hitler or one of the other Nazi leaders; a hangman’s noose, sometimes with an effigy of Hitler hanging from it; a model of the ash tree from the first production of Die Walküre; a globe of the earth (to show our concerns are cosmic); a wicker armchair (to invite us to reflection); dead leaves on the floor (melancholy); other associational busts, posters, pictures; a director’s chair; an outsize black megaphone; and a ubiquitous crystal paperweight containing, as the program notes tell us, a model of Edison’s Black Maria, the first movie studio and “symbol of the world of our inner projections” (because Syberberg believes that Hitler was, we must remember, a great film director). Over this is blown, during the hours, vast quantities of smoke and fumes from dry ice to show we are in hell, either Hitler’s hell or the hell of today’s “debased” society, characterized by Syberberg as “freedom without a human face.” In the first half of the film the typical scene is of a single human figure, wandering, talking, amid dummies and cardboard cutouts. In the latter half, for perspective, discourses are frequently delivered before a rear-projection of the Star-filled night sky.
What the viewer is given in these settings is an unending series of monologues, meditations, ruminations about Hitler. We have actors playing Hitler, Himmler, Hitler’s valet, Hitler’s private movie projectionist, but a great deal of the time we have unidentified actors merely talking, at least some of whom are plainly intended to be Syberberg himself, judging by such tags as, “As a film-maker, I. . . .” The program refers to them as “narrators” but there is no connected narrative line. At one point one of them says (in substance), “I have here some research notes which I was unable to work into the film”—after which he reads for perhaps an hour. There is never any action, and on the rare occasions when two live actors appear together in front of the camera they generally do not talk to each other: only one speaks, as if to himself. The music we hear is mostly Wagner, of course.
In one of the opening scenes, we see a circus ringmaster dressed in white-satin frock coat, top hat, face heavily made up. He announces the “greatest show on earth, the rehearsal for the end of the world.” The film we are about to see is no “money spinner which feeds on guilt and repentance,” he declaims defiantly. “This is no guilt exploitation movie!” Since Our Hitler, so poor in images, is essentially a literary work, a specimen of the prose that the audience is required to ingest for seven-and-a-half hours is worth quoting. Here is the ringmaster, still describing the film we are about to see:
Not porno, not underground film, not a good entertainment film, not documentary, or social criticism or Hollywood Boulevard film or horror show. But a journey into the midst of night, a hell ride to paradise lost, into our inner self. The mystery play of a historical Dance of Death in the black studio [movie studio] of our fantasy, the ascetic work of mourning on the end of an epoch, millions of dead. In olden times one would have called it an epos, a poem, requiem, oratorio; an attempt to find a new German identity through film. And also about the heritage of Hitler in our present world, something about the infernal victory of quantitative democracy, about the calmness of melancholy and the thesis that Hitler can only be defeated with Richard Wagner. The Last Judgment of our world before Hitler, who, not Christ, poses the question: What have you done after me, with your freedom?
Passing over the turgid, verbless style and lapses of coherent syntax, I will point out only that, so early in the film, the victory of democracy has already been called “infernal,” and Hitler has been evoked as a divine figure who will sit in judgment on the world at the Day of Reckoning.
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Before too long we are presented with the film’s cast of characters, particularly Hitler. In a strobe-lit sequence (the only one in the film in which there is sharp cutting), and to the accompaniment of Hitler’s actual radio speeches on the sound track, we are shown Hitler as a house painter, Hitler as Parsifal, Hitler as Napoleon, Hitler as Nero, Hitler as Hamlet in the grave-digger’s scene and addressing a skull marked “Jude,” Hitler as Frankenstein’s monster, Hitler in Nazi uniform balancing the globe on his head (he bounces it off like a soccer ball), Hitler as a Chicago gangster, Hitler as a jack-in-the-box, Hitler as Charlie Chaplin playing The Great Dictator.
The sequence is shot in a manner evoking a speeded-up silent-film comedy and, coming early on, as it does, before their attention wandered, has prompted some critics to describe the movie as a satire. It must be understood, however, that allusions in Our Hitler to other films and film-makers are not incidental—ineffectual attempts at virtuosity or coy winks at cinéaste colleagues—but absolutely fundamental and central to Syberberg’s movie; hence the use of Edison’s Black Maria as the predominant symbol and the endless wandering about of Syberberg’s twelve-year-old daughter with her hair draped in loose coils of 35-mm film stock. For Syberberg has constructed the stupendous conceit, which he spells out for us in so many words in his meditations, that Hitler—since he never visited the war front but had the daily newsreel footage screened for him privately before it was released to German theaters, and since nothing remains of the Nazi period but the films (not quite true)—was in fact not really engaged in war or politics but was actually making a movie, the ultimate Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk.
And so we are off on our meditations about Hitler. Noted among the hours of rambling ruminations from the different narrators:
Only the defeat of his arms has made us turn against him. . . . What if we had been first to build the atomic bomb? . . . In five hundred years who will ask if Frau Schulz was happy? [repeated] . . . Democracy, the source of misery in the 20th century. . . . Jews are the victors of Versailles and of the world. . . . Germans, now the frightened colonial slaves of foreign ideologies. . . . Joseph McCarthy—look how many Jews were willing to support him! . . . The Devil is loose in our wolfish society. . . . Today you need money to be human. . . . Tasteless U.S. chicken. . . . Whoever controls film controls the future. . . . We’re going to have to get rid of this notion of Jesus as a circumcised Jew. . . . The Hitler within us all [repeated many times]. . . . Ten thousand who beat their breasts and one fool who entertains them, laughing. . . . All are rogues, including me, but let me be the greatest! . . . He who sacrifices is chosen. . . . The redeemer redeemed. . . .
Also early in the film—in perhaps the most grotesque moment of those seven-and-a-half hours—a narrator, after citing the war’s fifty million dead and repeatedly evoking the Nazis’ extermination program, offers as a strict parallel Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s “butchery” (which is to say, reduction to normal running time) of the original seven-hour version of Erich von Stroheim’s silent film, Greed. He rants on about Hollywood’s “enemies of culture”: Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg, Gloria Swanson, Will Hays.
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Leaving Part I, “The Grail,” for Part II, “A German Dream,” we come to some interesting passages. An actor appears as Hitler’s private movie projectionist and tells us that Hitler liked Walt Disney and Fred Astaire. A great favorite of his was a German film on the Trapp family, whose story served as the basis for the later American film The Sound of Music. Soon we see Hitler (Heinz Schubert, a distinguished member of Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble), dressed in an imperial Roman toga, rise from the grave of Richard Wagner to deliver a long harangue situating himself in European history. He learned from Rome, England, the Jews themselves, he says, affirming that he is the inevitable product of Western European (not merely German) civilization. “I am the bad conscience of democratic government!” he declares. But the kernel of his entire speech is contained in one sentence, addressed to Europe, the world, everyone: I am your most secret wishes.
Then comes a forty-minute monologue (half the length of a standard movie) by an actor playing Hitler’s valet. After Syberberg’s rambling meditations, this compendium of facts seems oddly fascinating. We learn that Hitler breakfasted on two cups of warm milk, ten biscuits, and the broken-up bits of a bar of bitter chocolate. It took him twenty-two minutes to get ready in the morning. He shaved with two blades. We are told the brand name of his shaving cream, of his hair tonic. He changed hair tonic for a while, but then went back to his earlier preference. Hitler wore no undershirt, short underpants. He never wore colored shirts, never sports shirts, never a belt, only suspenders, and only thin socks, even in winter. Left to himself he would wear old boots, crumpled uniforms, “impossible” ties. It had to be explained to him that with light suits, black shoes were a “horror.” But he was a genial host. After 1942, however, he watched no more newsreels. (So much for the theory of Hitler as film-maker: unlike “the great Stroheim,” he abandoned his movie in the middle, missing all the climactic scenes.)
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At the mid-point dinner break, after almost four hours of film, the themes of Our Hitler are abundantly clear. Hitler was evil, but it was because we are all evil. We expressed our evil through him. “Where would Hitler have been without us?” This is the meaning of all the puppets and ventriloquists’ dummies (Heinz Schubert is the only “live” Hitler): the dummies, after all, say only what the ventriloquists, on whose knees they sit, want them to say. Occasionally the “we” of the narrators refers only to Germans (as, “We elected him,” and “What if we had been first to build the atomic bomb?”) but—particularly in passages assigning final responsibility and guilt—the film says again and again that all of mankind, or at the very least all members of Western civilization, are responsible for Hitler. In saying this, Our Hitler becomes a massive exculpation of Germany. The film is also, plainly, incoherent, bombastic, sophomoric, half-baked, and self-contradictory.
Nonetheless, at mid-point, many members of the audience the day I saw it patently still felt respect for a work that impressed them as severe, dense, forbidding. On the other hand, some 20 per cent of the spectators left at the dinner hour, never to return. Which is unfortunate, because it is the second half of Our Hitler which contains both the best and the worst.
The structure of the film is nowhere near as clear as the titles of sections would imply, but at the opening of Part III, “The End of Winter’s Tale,” the war, at least, is advanced. Against pictures of Nazi officers at the front on the transparencies, and later other war scenes, we see Heinrich Himmler, back in Berlin, being massaged by his Finnish masseur. Himmler mournfully talks of karma, says he is a Buddhist. He explains regretfully that Jews are subhuman (though he later attributes Heydrich’s beautiful playing of Mozart to his “Jewish blood”) and that the Nazis are compelled to exterminate them. But he also expresses his fear and horror at this necessity, hideous as it will later appear to the German people. The masseur (in a rare piece of dialogue) says he would be afraid to have to account for the Nazi misdeeds. Himmler assures him that they must all take this sacrifice upon themselves, for the good of Germany. He acknowledges the great cruelties the Jews are suffering, but compares them to the cruelties that others have suffered in history—for example, the extermination of the Red Indians by the Americans. “It is the curse of the great that they must exterminate to create new life,” he declares. At the end of the scene, the masseur pleads, “Reichsführer! Repent your cruel deeds!” Himmler suddenly begs the masseur not to leave him alone, and kisses his hand. Our portrait of the second personage of the Third Reich, Heinrich Himmler: lonely, mournful, a martyr to the Nazi view of German destiny.
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At the end of Part III we have something resembling a debate. One of the narrators is upbraiding a Hitler dummy, sitting on his knee, for turning Germany into “a new colony for America.” “You ruined UFA!,” he says (the pre-Hitler movie studio in Berlin), “ask Hollywood about its new overseas markets!”
Hitler rambles disconnectedly. His ideas have prevailed everywhere, he says, his voice croaking. “We have conquered everywhere, but in a subtle way.” He gives examples: Idi Amin, Zionism, Death Squads in Brazil, Chile, Red Brigades in Italy, Yasir Arafat with a pistol at the United Nations. In East Germany, Stalinism. In West Germany, terrorists, anarchists, women’s lib, the Volkswagen Beetle. In America, the Lockheed scandal. “Look at Russia. A stroke of genius to classify political opposition as mental disturbance!”
The narrator again attempts to draw up an indictment. Hitler split Germany. The Russians are on the Elbe. Without Hitler there would have been no state of Israel. (These are all consequent upon Hitler’s having lost, of course.) He blames Hitler for having destroyed the German Jews, “the best Germans! the shrewdest!” He also regrets the loss of more sensitive Jewish types like Franz Kafka and Robert Musil. “Who do the Jews have now? Moshe Dayan!” Hitler still doesn’t seem very repentant. “All are guilty,” he croaks. “But who is closer to God than the guilty?”
Again and again toward the conclusion of Part III, in a Judgment Day vein, with the music rising, the film seems to be ending. But it staggers on. Indeed, we have almost two more hours to go.
Part IV, “We Children of Hell,” incredibly (as if we have had lots of action up to now), is little but a prodigiously long rhetorical evocation of the spirit of Hitler by two narrators in alternation, sometimes with the Hitler dummy lying nearby, sometimes against the galaxies of the night sky. But this section also contains the most blatant statements of the film’s meaning. The location of the “hell” is now unequivocal: not Nazi Germany but present-day West Germany, the modern world.
A narrator recalls Hitler’s thinking. Order and subordination to a cause are the essential qualities of Germany. The nation was defeated by foreign ideas of republicanism, subjugated by alien ideas of democratic representation. Now the narrator proceeds on his own. Hitler was Siegfried, beset by enemies. Hitler was the catharsis of European history, the medium for the spirit of his age, the “mirror of our own dreams and passions.” We hear such snatches as “happy guilt” (or perhaps “joyous guilt”), “Christ triumphs over death,” “Hitler was right.”
To beguile us after this high thinking, we are offered anecdotes. An American GI, questioning von Schirach’s three-year-old daughter, snuffed out his cigarette on her arm. Rudolf Hess, on one occasion, did not have the heart to kill a wasp. He was “too kind,” not of the stuff of Hitler. Hitler wanted to build a Reich that would live for centuries. Again, “In five hundred years, who will ask if Frau Schulz was happy?” Charlemagne. Napoleon. Hitler was “the last maker of European history.” He dreamed “of Aryan world dominion . . . of the rule of a pure race over the world.” “What failed?” asks the narrator. We hear wartime German radio bulletins of “enemy planes over the Rhineland,” then Hitler’s real voice, exalted: “We go into this battle as into a church service.”
In the final exhortation, delivered mostly against the stars of far galaxies, the film takes one last step: the world awaits the New Hitler. “He is already among us,” we hear. “He is already in us. . . . Who will he be?” The narrator now castigates the Old Hitler as the “executioner of Western civilization.” He holds Hitler responsible for the “plague of materialism,” the “shaming rat race for profit,” the diminution of authority, fast-food chains, pollution (“They have taken away the sunset!”). He blames him, specifically, for “everything modern.” (But again, all these phenomena, surely in the mind of the film-maker, are the result of Hitler’s having lost.) “Freedom without a human face!” cries the narrator. “Hitler, here is your victory!”
There are more prophecies of the coming of the New Hitler, already among us. Finally, as the stars fly toward us, we have Hitler as godhead. “What have you done with the world since me?” Hitler took upon himself all the world’s evil, we are told once more, but “Who is closer to God than the guilty?” Among the last lines we hear is: “Hitler is the angel who bears the blame for the world’s sins.” The film closes on the ultimate symbol of mission, pursued unsuccessfully by Hitler but calling to us yet: Der Gral, the Grail.
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The day I saw Our Hitler, at its fifth public screening in New York, the end was greeted with a hearty chorus of hissing from the battered surviving spectators. Did they find the film too long? Artistically unsatisfying? Or did they perceive that the film they had witnessed was permeated from start to finish with Nazi thinking?
Syberberg’s defense in depth is his incoherence. Many, many statements made in the movie are contradicted fifteen minutes later. But the essential burden of the film is never contradicted. Hitler is described as magnificent, evil, an angel, a devil, but when he is called the Redeemer no one ever says he was not the Redeemer. No one ever says he did not represent the secret wishes of all of us, that we are not all responsible for Hitler.
Intertwined with its attitude toward Hitler is the film’s deep hatred of liberal democracy. What the movie seems to be saying, ultimately, is that Hitler, despite the nobility of his attempt to lift us from the mire of liberal democracy, went wrong. His vision was evil. But it is necessary to have a vision. And, next time around, the New Hitler, with a new mission—as yet unrevealed—will lead us to a higher, exalted sphere, to an earthly paradise.
Susan Sontag, who has been Our Hitler’s chief publicist, has conceived the notion that the film represents, at last, the acceptance of German guilt for the Nazi past—a view of such wrong-mindedness as to be breathtaking. The film, on behalf of Germany, accepts no guilt that it doesn’t instantly distribute to everyone else, to all of us. There is not a whisper of true contrition in the entire film. It is a work of fierce, bitter, angry German nationalism, reminiscent, in fact, of the mood that called forth Hitler to begin with. Why should Germany be unloved? it demands. Interestingly, it is in Germany itself, where perhaps they know what the movie is about, that Our Hitler is hated with a passion. It is only abroad that it has received such extravagant praise.
Syberberg himself does not give Miss Sontag’s thesis much support in his interviews. He is relaxed and glib in his “blame” of Germany for Hitler, but adds immediately: “I cannot today point my finger and say that this one was wrong, and that one was wrong. . . . Hitler’s story is . . . the entire history of European occidental life.” And in another interview: “It’s not only German history; it’s the history of Western culture.”
Having spread responsibility this widely, he casts doubt on what he means by “blame” to begin with by strenuously objecting to the whole process of attribution of guilt: “Even if you want to educate people in a political way, there’s no reason to show them who’s guilty. . . . What for?” Asked if his film condemns Hitler, he says simply: “No. . . . I sometimes think that Hitler was a poor guy, much too small for what he wanted.” (It is hard to see how a film can accept German “guilt” for Hitler without even condemning him.) Asked if he favors the continuing prosecution of Nazi war criminals, he is equally plain: “No. To take revenge is useless. What’s done is done. . . . I prefer to try to change a man. . . . You cannot change Rudolf Hess even if he stays in prison until he dies. He is a poor, pathetic man. I believe we are much more guilty [my emphasis] to keep him locked up in a cage for more than thirty years. . . . It is wrong to regard the Nazis as barbarians, even the SS in the concentration camps. Most of them were ordinary Germans: kind, bourgeois, often of the middle class. Most of them never had a chance to kill a Jew. . . .”
Syberberg’s attitude toward Jews is worth noticing. He disapproves in the strongest terms of people profiting financially from memoirs of the Nazi period. “People now make gold out of the ashes of Auschwitz,” he says with distaste. “The same people: Jews who perhaps lost members of their family now make money out of the ashes of Auschwitz. How Goebbels would laugh!” Syberberg must realize that the notion that money-grubbing is an essential Jewish trait—and that avarice in Gentile society is the result of Jewish influence—is central to historic anti-Semitism. On the other hand, Syberberg admires handsome, young Israeli soldiers carrying machine guns—as, indeed, did Adolf Eichmann.
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So Syberberg is free of Communist pieties, and Fassbinder is free of Nazi pieties, but both of them despise liberal democracy. Interestingly, neither has won inordinately high esteem at home. It is mainly in democratic countries abroad, above all in America, that they have both been greeted with thrilled acclaim. The situation is not without irony.
Would Goebbels have laughed? I think not, actually. His sense of the humorous was not noticeably stronger than that of Gauleiter Julius Streicher, who went to the gallows screaming, “Purim, 1946!” These men—Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Streicher—had a vision, but it was not of impressing audiences at Avery Fisher Hall.
