Theater of Cruelty (11 page)

The question is why a former leftist Holocaust researcher and neo-Nazi hunter would do this. There are, of course, examples of people switching from one form of radicalism to another. One of the most odious books written on the alleged amnesia about German suffering is by Klaus Rainer Röhl, an ex-Communist who turned to the far
right.
¹⁰
Röhl blames the Americans, Jewish “emigrants,” and German ’68ers for brainwashing the German people into feeling guilty about the Jewish Holocaust, while denying the destruction of Germans in death marches, terror bombing, and “death camps.” Here speaks the fury of a disillusioned radical, swapping a leftist utopia for the sour resentment of the self-pitying right.

Friedrich, however, appears to have fallen prey to a different kind of rage. The last chapter of
The Fire
and his book of photographs provide an indication.
The Fire
ends with a long lament for the destruction of German books kept in libraries and archives. The lament is justified, but its placement at the end of a 592-page book is curious, as though the loss of books, in the end, is even worse than the loss of people—which, from a particular long-term perspective, may actually be true, but that does not make it morally attractive. The choice and especially the editing of the pictures in
Brandstätten
leave a similar impression. There are horrifying pictures of corpses being scooped up in buckets, and other images of frightful human suffering. (The fact that these corpses are being handled by concentration camp inmates is mentioned without further comment.) But the real calamity, as it is presented in Friedrich’s book, is the destruction of beautiful old cities, of ancient churches, rococo palaces, baroque town halls, and medieval streets. The first thirty-eight pages of the book are given to photographs of Germany before Bomber Harris did his worst.

It is right to feel sad about the loss of all this historic beauty. For Friedrich this is something akin to losing the German soul. “Those who lose their lives,” he writes, “leave the places they created and which created them. The ruined place is the emptiness of the survivors.” The Germans, he believes, have been disinherited and lost their
“central historical perspective.” The last photographs of the book contrast the beauty of old German streets with the ugliness of what came after.

Again perspectives count. Friedrich’s anger about feeling disinherited is directed not just at the Anglo-American morale bombers but also at the postwar Germans who refused to recognize the damage. Out of the catastrophic destruction came a zealous need to construct a new, modern postwar Germany, stripped of history, which had been so badly stained by Hitler’s legacy. Hans Magnus Enzensberger once observed that one cannot understand “the mysterious energy of the Germans” if one refuses “to realize that they have made a virtue of their deficiencies. Insensibility was the condition of their success.”

It is this insensibility that angers Friedrich, this lack of feeling for the “needlessly sacrificed old cities,” the collective turning away from German history and culture. Perhaps he puts too high a premium on material rather than human damage. Friedrich might have mentioned that by far the bigger blow to German
Kultur
was the murder and expulsion of many of the best and most intelligent people of an entire generation. The loss to Germany of the cultivated German-Jewish bourgeoisie is impossible to calculate. Wrapped inside Friedrich’s highly conservative lament, however, is a leftist rage against Americanization and West German capitalism. This is where the old ’68er meets the chronicler of German victimhood. His aim seems to be not only to wrest the history of German suffering from the clutch of the far right but to rescue the glories of German history from the twelve years of Hitler’s thousand-year Reich. And this, despite the pitfalls that Friedrich has not always been able to dodge, seems a perfectly respectable thing to do.

EAST BERLIN, OCTOBER
1990: Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, the grand master of cinematic kitsch, walked into the old conference room where the German Communists founded their state. He had just seen part of his film
Hitler—a Film from Germany
for the first time in years. “My God,” he said to a gathering of people that included Susan Sontag, the actress Edith Clever, and various East German cultural worthies who smiled a lot and drank vodka. “My God, I was really provocative! If only my enemies had realized.… I am surprised I’m still alive!” Whereupon the artist stroked his beautiful tie, smoothed his superbly coiffed head, and looked around the table like the cat who had just eaten the canary.

Two days later, we met once again in the former government building, now the Academy of Arts, to hear Syberberg, Sontag, Clever, and other members of a distinguished panel discuss his works, in particular the Hitler film and his recently published book of essays, which has caused a big fuss in German literary circles.
¹
Syberberg began the proceedings by saying that only here, in the former Communist
capital, could he openly express his views, unlike in West Berlin, where the academy was controlled by his left-wing enemies.

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 the 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, 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?”

I thought of Günter Grass, who, with the lugubrious look of a wounded walrus, complained night after night on television that nobody
would listen to him anymore. His constant invocation of “Auschwitz” as a kind of talisman to ward off a reunited Germany had the air of desperation, the desperation of a man who had lost his vision of Eden. His Eden was not the former GDR, to be sure, but at least the GDR carried, for Grass, the promise of a better Germany, a truly socialist Germany, a Germany without greed, Hollywood, and ever-lurking fascism.

I thought of Syberberg, who gloomily predicted that the awesome spectacle of a newly unified German
Volk
, his vision of Eden, would soon be replaced by the rancid democracy of party politics. And I thought of Christa Wolf, who had made a speech in East Berlin exactly a year before. The revolution, she said, had also liberated language. One of the liberated words is “dream”: “Let us dream that this is socialism, and let us stay where we are.”

Syberberg, Grass, and Wolf: they would seem to have little in common, apart from being earnest German intellectuals who loathe “Hollywood.” But they all bring to mind something the wise old utopian Ernst Bloch once wrote:

In her famous essay on Syberberg’s
Hitler—a Film from Germany
, Sontag makes much of the multiplicity of voices and views expressed in his work: “One can find almost anything in Syberberg’s passionately voluble film (short of a Marxist analysis or a shred of feminist awareness).”
³
It is not that she ignores those aspects of Syberberg that upset many German critics—the Wagnerian intoxication with deep Germanness, for example—but she sees them as single strands in a rich combination of ideas, images, and reflections. They are not to be dismissed, she thinks, but they also should not be allowed to obscure the genius of his work, which cannot be reduced to certain vulgar opinions, to the quirks one almost expects of a great and eccentric artist.

It is a respectable view, which is, however, not shared by the artist himself. As he made clear in his essays, as well as on stage at the East Berlin Academy of Arts, Syberberg does not separate his political, social, and aesthetic opinions from his art. Indeed, they are at the core of his creative work.

His ideas, expressed in films, theater, and essays, are certainly consistent. In the collage of images and sounds that make up his Hitler film, which, as Sontag rightly observes, is a kind of theater of the mind, there is never any doubt in whose mind the action takes place. It is not Hitler’s mind, even though Syberberg salutes the dictator as a demonic colleague, a man who saw his destruction of Europe as an endless, epic newsreel. 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: