On hell and Heimat – Ian Buruma in 1990 in NYRB:

‘Syberberg’s delivery was remarkable: an almost silky tone of voice alternating with what can only be described as a theatrical tirade; a tirade against the filth, the shamelessness, the soulless greed, and vacuous idiocy of contemporary (West) German culture, corrupted by America, by rootless “Jewish leftists,” by democracy. Syberberg also believes that the pernicious legacy of Auschwitz has crippled the German identity that was rooted in the German soil, in Wagner’s music, in the poetry of Hölderlin and the literature of Kleist, in the folk songs of Thuringia and the noble history of Prussian kings—a Kultur, in short, transmitted from generation to generation, through the unbroken bloodlines of the German people, so cruelly divided for forty years as punishment for the Holocaust.
Well, said some of Syberberg’s champions on the panel, shifting uneasily in their seats, these opinions may be absurd, even offensive, but he’s still a great artist. Then an elderly man got up in the audience. He had seen the Hitler film, he said, his voice trembling with quiet rage, and he thought it was dreadful. He was left with the impression that Syberberg actually liked Hitler. And although he was a Polish Jew who had lost most of his family in the death camps, he could almost be tempted to become a Nazi himself after seeing that film: “All those speeches, all that beautiful music….” Then followed a remark that stayed in my mind, as I tried to make sense of Syberberg, and of the literary debates raging in Germany this year, in the wake of November 1989: “Why is it,” the Polish Jew said, “that when a forest burns, German intellectuals spend all their time discussing the deeper meaning of fire, instead of helping to put the damned thing out?”’

(…)

‘Hitler, in Syberberg’s opinion, was “a genius, who acted as the medium of the Weltgeist.” But it is Syberberg’s mind, not to mention his Geist, that has shaped everything in the spectacle; and the fascinating thing is that Syberberg’s philosophy, if that is what it is, is articulated most clearly by a ventriloquist’s dummy in the shape of Hitler.’

(…)

‘This monologue, in which Hitler, as a melancholy puppet, talks about his legacy to the world, comes at the end of the third part of the four-part film: “Friends, let us praise. Praise the progress of the world from the other world of death. Praise from Adolf Hitler on this world after me…. No one before me has changed the West as thoroughly as we have. We have brought the Russians all the way to the Elbe and we got the Jews their state. And, after a fashion, a new colony for the USA—just ask Hollywood about its export markets. I know the tricks better than any of you, I know what to say and do for the masses. I am the school of the successful democrat. Just look around, they are in a fair way to take over our legacy….
“People like me want to change the world. And the Germany of the Third Reich was merely the Faustian prelude in the theater. You are the heirs. Worldwide.
“On November 10, 1975, the United Nations resolved by a two-thirds majority, quite openly, that Zionism is a form of racism….
“And in the United States? Nothing about gas at Auschwitz on American TV. It would damage the American oil industry and everything having to do with oil. You see, we did win, in bizarre ways. In America….
“Long live mediocrity, freedom, and equality for the international average. Among third-class people interested only in the annual profit increase or a higher salary, destroying themselves, relentlessly, ruthlessly, moving toward their end and what an end.” It is disturbing to hear condemnations of Zionism, let alone sneers about “third-class people,” through the mouth of Hitler, even if he is just an effigy, a dummy transmitting Syberberg’s voice. But the message is not new. The rantings about America being the heir to Hitler’s projects would hardly surprise if they came from the pen of, say, Allen Ginsberg in full flight (Christa Wolf I shall leave until later). And the offensive trick of defusing German guilt by equating Hitler with Zionism also has a familiar ring. As for blaming democracy, Hitler’s first victim, for its own demise (as Syberberg puts it in one of his essays: “Electoral democracy logically leads to Hitler”), that is a favorite ploy of antidemocrats everywhere. But Syberberg’s disgust with the third-class postwar world goes further than that; it has turned his misty mind toward a dark and exalted vision of the German Kultur, which makes many of his countrymen squirm.’ (…)

‘But who has imposed this taboo? And why has German art and society “degenerated” to such a low point? In Syberberg’s new book of essays we get to the nub of the matter: The Jewish interpretation of the world followed upon the Christian, just as the Christian one followed Roman and Greek culture. So now Jewish analyses, images, definitions of art, science, sociology, literature, politics, the information media, dominate. Marx and Freud are the pillars that mark the road from East to West. Neither are imaginable without Jewishness. Their systems are defined by it. The axis USA-Israel guarantees the parameters. That is the way people think now, the way they feel, act and disseminate information. We live in the Jewish epoch of European cultural history. And we can only wait, at the pinnacle of our technological power, for our last judgment at the edge of the apocalypse…. So that’s the way it looks, for all of us, suffocating in unprecedented technological prosperity, without spirit, without meaning.
The indictment continues in Syberberg’s strange, ungrammatical, baroque style: “Those who want to have good careers go along with Jews and leftists,” and “the race of superior men [Rasse der Herrenmenschen] has been seduced, the land of poets and thinkers has become the fat booty of corruption, of business, of lazy comfort.”’ (…)

‘Syberberg is not so much a crypto- or neo-Nazi as a reactionary dandy, of the type found before the war in the Action Française, or in certain British aristocratic circles (whose spirit lives on in The Salisbury Review today). Like T.S. Eliot, Ernst Jünger, Charles Maurras, and Curzio Malaparte, he is a self-appointed savior of European Kultur from the corrupt forces of alien, often Semitic, barbarism. And culture, in his mind, is associated with an ideal community, always in the past, before the expulsion from Eden, a Gemeinschaft, where the Volk was united, rooted, organic, hierarchic. “German unity, Silesia, beauty, feeling, enthusiasm. Perhaps we should rethink Hitler. Perhaps we should rethink ourselves.”’

(…)

‘Nonetheless, Syberberg, despite his self-aggrandizing paranoia as a persecuted genius, has a point. It is true that it is difficult to be an admirer of German Romanticism these days without being reminded of its perversions. To talk seriously about the ties of Blood and Soil in Germany is impossible without thinking of the consequences of such ideas in the past. It is also true, however, that antifascism has become reified, to use the phrase invented by the great Jewish leftist himself, Karl Marx. It was not something you could argue about. Antifascism was the state religion and historical alibi of the ancien régime in the eastern half of Germany, and it gave the leftist intellectuals of the Federal Republic a kind of moral stick with which to beat off all challenges from the right.’

(…)

‘Earlier this year a radical right-wing journal published a tract by Börgfleth, entitled Deutsches Manifest. Like Syberberg’s essays, it was inspired by the 1989 revolt in East Germany: “The people’s movement in the GDR was the real Germany, which the West Germans have betrayed—betrayed to a capitalist-liberal economic epidemic, which devoured the body of the Volk, betrayed to the cult of technology, which is destroying the land, and to cosmopolitan lies, which are intended to complete the destruction of the German national character.” This is more or less identical to Syberberg’s view, but what is more remarkable is its similarity to some of the opinions held by such “antifa” prophets of the left as Günter Grass, or the East German playwright Heiner Müller. They, too, have a horrific vision of the destruction of the Volk by D-Marks and technology. They also believe that the People have been betrayed by the West. It is indeed an old conceit of both right-wing and left-wing romantics to believe that the soul of the people was preserved in a purer and more innocent state under the old Communist regime. Which brings me to Christa Wolf.’

(…)

‘Christa Wolf, like all her colleagues in the GDR, had developed a fine sense for censorial sensitivities, and knew pretty much how far she could push her luck. But the East Germans had an advantage over writers in other Communist countries in that they could have their work published in West Germany. Some of Wolf’s novels, Cassandrafor example, actually appeared in two versions: a censored one in the East and an unexpurgated one in the West.’

(…)

‘Embarrassing, insensitive, certainly; dishonest, perhaps. But can Christa Wolf be accused of being a “collaborator,” a Mitlaufer, as they say in German? Was she simply a vulgar careerist, after all? Should she have spoken out more forcefully against the GDR regime? Does the fact that she did not discredit her as a writer? Does it detract from her work? These questions are being asked, sometimes by people who didn’t have to face the dilemmas of a Communist state. To demand courage in another person is always a tricky business when one is not exposed to the same dangers oneself. There is an element of hypocrisy involved here too, since many Western intellectuals applauded writers like Christa Wolf, as well as the leftist, anti-American causes she stood for. If she is to be crucified for her opinions, so should many much more comfortably placed people in the West. And if it’s a matter of feeling betrayed by a writer who was thought to have been a dissident, she certainly never pretended to be one.
And yet, the positions of writers in quasi-totalitarian states must be taken into account in an assessment of their work. Hermann Broch once remarked that “truthfulness is the only criterion for autonomous art.” But could art produced in a state like the GDR ever be called autonomous?’

(…)

‘t is interesting that both Syberberg and Wolf share a fascination for Kleist and the German Romantics. Could it be that in their respective quests for utopia—in Syberberg’s case a kind of kitsch, de-Nazified vision of Blood and Soil, in Wolf’s an ideal socialist state without Stalin—that they have something deeper in common than a loathing for America and messy liberal democracy? Do they miss, perhaps, the heady sense of idealism of their youth, which they have tried to recreate, in their different ways, ever since? This makes them rather anomalous in a nation that is distinctly lacking in idealistic fervor these days, but it is precisely why Wolf still admonished the masses to “dream” and why Syberberg uses every opportunity to vent his misanthropic disgust with the modern world and the people who live in it. They are intellectuals forever in search of the ideal community.
In an interview given in 1982, Wolf says something very self-revealing about the German Romantics of the nineteenth century: “They perceived with some sensitivity that they were outsiders, that they were not needed in a society which was in the process of becoming industrial society, of intensifying the division of labour, or turning people into appendages of machines.” (…)

‘Because this ideal community is an imaginary one, he must invent it, through the kitsch of his childhood: Hitler’s speeches, Karl May’s adventure stories, and echoes from Bayreuth. Which may be why his film sets look like gigantic toy stores, with Syberberg, as a monstrous child, rummaging through the props of his imagination.
Wolf, whose fantasy was never as baroque as Syberberg’s, invented her imaginary community in the Communist state. Her communism, as is so often true, was always reactionary, the road back to something that was lost, long ago. Something she would never forget, just as Cassandra couldn’t forget Troy: All this, the Troy of my childhood, no longer exists except inside my head. I will rebuild it there while I still have time, I will not forget a single stone, a single incidence of light.’

Read the article here.

In Ian Penman’s recently published book on Fassbinder (and Penman himself) I came across the name Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. (‘Syberberg himself, the great cinematic visionary, started in television.’)
That was a long time ago.
The great cinematic visionary, clearly Ian Buruma and quite a few in Germanyfelt the wish to add some footnotes to the visionary.

Although I believe that his documentary on the Wagner-family is very much worth seeing.

And the disgust of modernity, the opposition and the meaninglessness of machines can still be found in many corners of the world. Not only romantic gestures are larded with hints of fascism, but the longing is still potentially catastrophic.
Christa Wolf has largely been forgotten, but there was a time that some people stated that she deserved the Nobel, as Buruma points out.

Authors are like stocks, they go up and down, sometimes they completely disappear.

The deeper meaning of fire is still being discussed; we cannot be bothered to become firefighters. It’s just below us, and the high priests of Antifa give the firefighters too often a bad name.