Hans-Jürgen Syberberg

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg in the film The Ister, 2004.

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (born December 8 1935) is a German film director, whose most well-known film is his lengthy feature, Hitler: ein Film aus Deutschland.

Biography

Born in Nossendorf, Vorpommern, the son of an estate owner, Syberberg lived until 1945 in Rostock and Berlin. In 1952 and 1953 he created his first 8 mm. takes of rehearsals by the Berliner Ensemble. In 1953 he moved to the Federal Republic of Germany, where he in 1956 began studies in literature and art history, completing them the following year. He earned his doctorate in Munich with his thesis on "The Absurd in Dürrenmatt". In 1963 Syberberg began producing documentary films about Fritz Kortner and Romy Schneider for Bavarian Radio and others. He continues to live in Munich.

Cinema

Cinema represents a vital passion for Syberberg, a Gesamtkunstwerk. His cinematographic work results from a fusion between two fundamentally contradictory poles of German cultural heritage: 18th century rationalism and 19th century mysticism. His work has captured international interest: Susan Sontag, Gilles Deleuze and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe have written about his work, and Francis Ford Coppola's film company released his Hitler: ein Film aus Deutschland (Hitler: A Film from Germany) in the United States, under the rather more provocative title Our Hitler.

In 1975 Syberberg released Winifried Wagner und die Feschichte des Hauses Wahnfried von 1914-1975 (English title: The Confessions of Winifred Wagner), a documentary about Winifred Wagner, an Englishwoman who had married Richard Wagner's son Siegfried. The documentary attracted attention because it exposed Mrs Wagner's unrepentant admiration for Adolf Hitler. The film thus proved an embarrassment to the Wagner family and the Bayreuth Festival (which she had run from 1930 until the end of the Second World War). Winifred Wagner objected to the inclusion in the film of conversations she did not know were being recorded.

Syberberg is also noted for the acclaimed visual interpretation of the Wagner opera Parsifal (1982).

Controversy

Syberberg's work has attracted criticism at least since the publication of the film script of Hitler: A Film from Germany, particularly from the Left, who were targets of his criticism in that book. In later essays, although he never presented himself as a conservative or sympathizer with German nationalism, his comments began to scandalize a broad spectrum of writers and critics in Germany and elsewhere. Even Susan Sontag, a fan of Syberberg's who wrote the introduction to the English translation of Hitler: A Film from Germany, was reportedly shocked by some of his later statements in print, though she said it didn't change how she felt about his films. In one notorious example Syberberg wrote in "Vom Ungluck und Gluck: der Kunst in Deutschland nach dem Kriege" (On the Misfortune and Fortune of Art in Germany after the War) "One could make a career out of consorting with Jews or leftists, forming bonds that had nothing to do with love, or uderstanding, or even inclination. Jews must have put up with this since they wanted power."

Ian Buruma in the the New York Review of Books quotes several of Syberberg's controversial statements. Syberberg has described modern German art as "filthy and sick... in praise of cowardice and treason, of criminals, whores, of hate, ugliness, of lies and crimes and all that is unnatural." Syberberg has written that "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... 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."

Buruma writes: "It is not for his aesthetics, however, that Syberberg has been attacked, but for his politics. The strongest criticism of his book was published in Der Spiegel, the liberal weekly magazine. Syberberg's views, wrote the critic, were precisely those that led to the book burning in 1933, and prepared the way for the Final Solution of 1942. In fact, he went on, they are worse, for "now we know that they are caked with blood…. They are not just abstruse nonsense, they are criminal." The Spiegel critic compared Syberberg to the young Hitler, the failed art student in Vienna, who rationalized his failure by blaming it on a conspiracy of left-wing Jews. Syberberg feels he is an unappreciated genius, and he too blames it on the same forces.

"Frank Schirrmacher, the young literary editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and the scourge of woolly thinkers of all political persuasions, is equally opposed to Syberberg and draws similar parallels with the Twenties and Thirties. And like the critic in Der Spiegel, he singles out for special censure an interview with Die Zeit in which Syberberg claimed that he 'could understand' the feeling of the SS man on the railway ramp of Auschwitz, who, in Himmler's words, 'made himself hard' for the sake of fulfilling his mission to the end. He did not admire this feeling, but he could understand it. Just as he could understand its opposite, the rejection of principles to act humanely."

Filmography

• 1965 - Fünfter Akt, Siebte Szene. Fritz Kortner probt Kabale und Liebe
• 1965 - Romy. Anatomie eines Gesichts
• 1966 - Fritz Kortner spricht Monologe für eine Schallplatte
• 1966 - Wilhelm von Kobell
• 1966 - Die Grafen Pocci - einige Kapitel zur Geschichte einer Familie
• 1968 - Scarabea - Wieviel Erde braucht der Mensch
• 1969 - Sex-Business - made in Pasing
• 1970 - San Domingo
• 1970 - Nach meinem letzten Umzug
• 1972 - Ludwig - Requiem für einen jungfräulichen König
• 1972 - Theodor Hirneis oder: Wie man ehem. Hofkoch wird
• 1974 - Karl May
• 1975 - Winifried Wagner und die Feschichte des Hauses Wahnfried von 1914-1975 (Orig.: 302 mins. US version: 104 mins)
• 1978 - Hitler: A Film from Germany
• 1981 - Parsifal
• 1984 - Die Nacht
• 1985 - Edith Clever liest Joyce
• 1986 - Fräulein Else
• 1987 - Penthesilea
• 1989 - Die Marquise von O.
• 1993 - Syberberg filmt Brecht
• 1994 - Ein Traum, was sonst
• 1997 - Höhle der Erinnerung

Syberberg features prominently in the film, The Ister (2004).

Secondary literature

Goossens, Guido, Verloren zonsondergangen. Hans Jürgen Syberberg en het linkse denken over rechts in Duitsland. Amsterdam University Press, 2004.

External links

• Syberberg's Homepage
• Hans-Jürgen Syberberg at IMDb
• The Ister, a film featuring Syberberg, Bernard Stiegler, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.