Theater of Cruelty (12 page)

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 German
Kultur
, which makes many of his countrymen squirm.

Syberberg believes in Germany as a
Naturgemeinschaft
, an organic community whose art grows from the native soil. Art, he writes, was once “the balsam on the wounds of the ‘I,’ which was identical with the native land,” whereas now art has lost its meaning, for the postwar Germans have lost their identity as Germans, have severed their umbilical cord with the soil that nurtured them. Postwar German art is “filthy and sick.” It is “in praise of cowardice and treason, of criminals, whores, of hate, ugliness, of lies and crimes
and all that is unnatural.”
⁵
It is, in other words, rootless and degenerate. German art can only be elevated from this stinking swamp by dedicating itself once again to beauty, the beauty of nature and the
Volk
. Like many attempts to make a cult of beauty, Syberberg’s art often plummets from its exalted heights into kitsch: Wagner booming away on the soundtrack as a tearful Viennese aesthete reads Syberberg’s poetic vision of impending doom.

A German journalist once did the obvious thing: he showed Syberberg a tract on degenerate art written in the 1930s by the Nazi propagandist Alfred Rosenberg and compared it to Syberberg’s words. Syberberg admitted there were similarities, but argued that just because Rosenberg said the same thing, this didn’t mean it was wrong. Thank God, he said, he hadn’t thought of Rosenberg, for then he might not have stated his honest opinion, for such is the terrible taboo left by the Nazi past on German aesthetic traditions.

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 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.” Over and over, the message is banged home: the real winners of the last war are the Jews, who have regained their motherland, their ancient
Heimat
, the very thing the Germans have lost. And the Jews had their revenge for Auschwitz by dropping the atom bomb and atomizing the
Kultur
of Europe through their barren, rationalist, rootless philosophy.

The old man who stood up in the East Berlin Academy was wrong, of course: Syberberg does not like Hitler. Like Ernst Jünger, an author he often quotes, he sees Hitler as a megalomaniac, who vulgarized and distorted ideals that should have been kept pure, beautiful, in the custodianship either of rough and simple peasants, the purest representatives of the old
Volk
, or of aristocratic
Feingeister
, such as Jünger and Syberberg, the true heirs of Hölderlin, Kleist, and Wagner. Hitler’s greatest crime was not to kill six million Jews—an act of which Syberberg does not approve—but to destroy the
Herrenvolk
, or rather, the culture of the
Herrenvolk
, by tainting it with his name, by making, as Syberberg often puts it, Blood and Soil a taboo.

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. 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.”

As the examples of Malaparte and even Jünger show, this is not a matter of being left or right: it can be both. It is certainly antidemocratic, for the institutionalized conflict of interests, without which democracy cannot exist, is deeply offensive to those who dream of organic communities. In Syberberg’s case, his politics are in fact as Green as they are tinged with Brown. He worships nature in a way that only a man who holds people, as opposed to the People, in contempt can. His ideal view of the
Naturgemeinschaft Deutschland
comprises “plants, animals, and people,” in that order.

Yet for this most dandified of aesthetes, it is not so much nature itself as the idea of nature that appeals, the antiurban ideal of a natural order. His work in theater and cinema is anything but natural, or organic, or raw, but, on the contrary, highly artificial. If Syberberg had a sense of humor his art would be camp. When Edith Clever ends her monologue in the recent Berlin stage production of Kleist’s
The Marquise of O
(directed by Syberberg), she turns around, and in a gesture that is supposed to denote deep melancholy, stretches her arm and releases a dead oak leaf, which flutters slowly, like an arid butterfly, to the ground. She just, but only just, gets away with it because she is a great actress. In lesser hands this moment of supreme “beauty” would be more like something out of Charles Ludlam’s Theater of the Ridiculous.

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.
⁶
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 1920s and 1930s. 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.

No doubt Syberberg, who genuinely does not regard himself as a Nazi sympathizer, sees such attacks as further proof of his claim that a taboo is blocking an honest appraisal of German history. As soon as one talks about anything that smacks of mystical ties with the German soil, or anything that suggests identification with certain aspects or people of the Nazi period, out pops the Nazi bogeyman, and one is immediately called a fascist or a Nazi. There are, of course, some good reasons for this.

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.

One can easily understand why antifascism should have become an obsessive concern of the liberal German intelligentsia, and why the more prominent “antifa” spokesmen have cloaked themselves in the moral mantles of a higher priesthood. It has to do with collective guilt, with the fact that many collaborators with Nazism continued to occupy important positions in the West German judiciary, in business, even at the universities. It is also because until the 1960s Nazism was a guilty national secret in the Federal Republic, something one didn’t discuss in polite circles. Those who did were often precisely the people Syberberg accused of robbing the Germans of their precious identity: returned refugees from Hitler, such as Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch.

A reaction was bound to come and it emerged in the 1980s, when historical revisionism and neoconservatism became popular everywhere, from Chicago to Frankfurt to Tokyo. Some of the reaction, not only in Germany, came in the form of a neoromantic critique of rationalism and liberalism. Syberberg’s publisher, Matthes & Seitz, played a part in this. One of its authors, Gerd Börgfleth, launched an attack on “the cynical Enlightenment.” Like Syberberg he blamed
the “returned Jewish left-wing intelligentsia” for “wishing to remodel Germany according to their own cosmopolitan standards. In this they have succeeded so well that for two decades there has been no independent German spirit at all.”
⁷

At the same time in
The Salisbury Review
several British writers began to celebrate a mystical reverence for the English spirit, and historians cast doubt on left-liberal interpretations of recent history. As anti-anticommunism went out of fashion, anti-antifascism gained respectability. But it was one thing for, say, Roger Scruton to celebrate the spirit of England; it was quite another for Germans and Japanese to behave in a similar way; they could not respectably get around the war. Anti-Semitism, an old tradition in European nationalism everywhere, cannot possibly be separated from German
Blut und Boden
. Hence the acrimonious tone of the “Historians’ Debate” in Germany, hence the bitter controversy around Syberberg. And hence the strong emotions unleashed by the chauvinistic aspects of the 1989 revolt and the process of unification that followed.

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:

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.